The rise and rise of the disaster bisexual

Posted on March 27, 2024 by binarythis

Move over bury your gays, there’s a new trope in town and it’s about murderous bisexual chaos. (Note: some spoilers below for Passages, Poor Things, Saltburn and Love Lies Bleeding – I’ve tried to make it obvious where I discuss each so you can skip specific films you haven’t seen).

We bisexuals are constantly trying to claim things are bi, like bob haircuts, Freddie Mercury, sitting in chairs weirdly, lemon squares, and green velvet couches.

Not long ago I was reading through my high school diaries and found an entry musing on whether I was bisexual. I was sixteen. I did not use the word of course, I simply – coded and cautiously – mentioned that I had read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine about women who also like men and women both, and “y’know, maybe that’s me”. Skip forward several decades of grappling with my sexual identity, literally writing a PhD about being queer femme, and becoming a scholar who works on queer theory and sexuality… I am (fingers crossed) finally feeling pretty at ease with calling myself bisexual.

Sure we have the least exciting flag, but a few key insights for me have been: my affinity with other bisexuals (we just get each other, we see each other); the recognition that my desire does not transcend gender, but rather, is for all the genders (so many! I love them all! So hot!); that bisexual experience is about recognising shame that goes in multiple and maybe unexpected directions (e.g. feeling bad about having heterosexual desires); that the reality of homophobia deepens biphobia as we split into camps to save ourselves, but the need to have the grace to understand these structuring forces. Of course all of the angst I have grappled with over the years is probably just because I am a millennial – it seems that Gen Z are much more comfortable with their gender and sexual fluidity.

But what of bisexual representation in these shifting times? I last reflected on this question in 2019 (“Twenty BiTeen”). Back then I concluded that negative tropes about bisexuality (of greediness, just a phase, and straight privilege) were, in a very small strand of emerging bisexual representation, starting to be reworked and resisted. In 2022 I also wrote a paper about bisexuality as “the refusal to refuse”, aka the refusal of choosing a single monosexual line of desire. In part this paper looked at the distinction between the “bury your gays” trope where homosexuality is represented as a tragedy (the gay character dies), versus straight rom coms where heterosexuality is represented as an inevitable comedy (replete with failure). I argued that in contrast bisexuality was rarely intelligible at all – neither tragedy or comedy, simply an impossibility.

But since writing these pieces, something new has emerged. Enter: the disaster bisexual.

A disaster bisexual is, just as it suggests on the can, loosely defined as a bisexual character or person who has chaotic energy or causes chaos. It seems to be a term used with some affection (“oh what a disaster bisexual!”) and often personal identification (“I’m such a disaster bisexual!” – to which everyone replies “yes”). The disaster bisexual is not your typical queer-coded villain, but rather, an anti-hero. The term seems to pleasurably press the bruise of internalised biphobia. When you cannot corral your desires into a neat monosexual storyline, this can feel chaotic.

According to the internet, the term originated from a D&D meme about sexuality in 2017, but it really took off as a concept in wider circulation in 2022/2023. I would argue that we are now seeing echoes of this discourse in representation on screen, in films like Passages, Poor Things, Saltburn and Love Lies Bleeding (and so many more I have not had the chance to see yet!). Notably in none of these representations is the word “bisexual” used, the characters are simply depicted as having sex with people of multiple genders. This continues a long trend in representation where bisexual desire is represented but not named.

However, importantly, these representations take the disaster bisexual into sinister territory. While queer publications like Them last year lauded the rise of “the nuanced bi characters we’ve been waiting for” I was somewhat perplexed by this celebratory tone. Journalist Billie Walker suggested that “It’s not that we don’t want bisexuals to do bad things on screen. We just want them to do more interesting bad things, and for more interesting reasons”. Hmmm. Let’s take a look at some examples…

I saw the French romance/drama film Passages at the Melbourne Queer Film festival in 2023. On the night it was introduced by festival curator Cerise Howard as addressing the historical gap in programming bisexual representation, to which (me included) the audience whooped and cheered. At the end of the film I turned to the person I was with and laughed “well…we wouldn’t call it positive bisexual representation would we!” In the film the main character Tomas takes a bisexual wrecking ball to his life and loves with such chaos that by the end of the film you are cheering his downfall. Walker suggests that it would be a “lazy” reading of the film to see Tomas’ bisexuality as the cause of crisis in the film, rather than look to his egotism. But sometimes surface readings are the most important to understanding how tropes congeal. The most obvious interpretation is that Tomas is a disaster bisexual, leaving a trail of emotional carnage in the lives of the monosexual characters who foolishly love him.

Similarly in science-fiction comedy/drama Poor Things, the sexual exploits of main character Bella are depicted as leaving destruction in her wake. Much of the film focuses on Bella developing a sense of self through her sexual adventures. She is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, a gothic vehicle for representing society’s repressed desires. While she is the centre of the film, and we are essentially on Bella’s side (especially as she escapes the clutches of both wimpish and controlling men), she is also violently dangerous: unpredictably squashing, stabbing, or surgically destroying those in her path. Notably at the end we see Bella living in some kind of polyamorous bisexual utopia (albeit one with a slightly disturbing goat).

On violence, we can turn here to black comedy thriller Saltburn where our central disaster bisexual is perhaps the most ominous of all. Oliver is not simply violent, but a pathological liar and epitome of destructive Dionysian desire. Oliver lusts over the bodily and earthly – cum, blood and literal dirt – and it is at once disturbing and entertaining. Oliver is both compelling and scary. He is close to the material and earthly, and just as uncontrollable. At the end he is alone and happy, and everyone else is dead.

Finally, in romance thriller Love Lies Bleeding, our central protagonists are Lou and Jackie/Jack. While Lou is assuredly gay, and wary of sleeping with Jack in case she is just a “curious” straight, Jack notes that she likes “both” men and women. Arguably the central drama of the film is caused by a combination of Lou’s brother in law’s domestic violence, and the fact that Jack has slept with the brother in law. When Jack gets vengeance it is ambiguous as to whether she is trying to right the wrong of the brother in law’s violence, or, atone for the hurt caused by her bisexual exploits. While Jack is depicted throughout as uncontrollable, unpredictable, and totally chaotic, Lou is remarkably together and always cleaning up after her.

Of course there are many other things to say about these films that are not purely about the disaster bisexuality of it all – about rage and families and vengeance and kinks – but it is telling that all of these disaster bisexual films rather unusually mix up genres of comedy/romance with drama/thriller. This speaks to bisexuality sitting at the intersection of heterosexual (comedy) and homosexual (tragedy) tropes: an uncomfortable mash. As such these films do not end in classic “tragedy”, rather, we see the bisexual emerging intact despite the rubble from which they emerge.

Yes, these films are not all “about” bisexuality but in all of these films bisexual desires are at the heart of the drama and often the cause of crisis. Many of the scenes in these films are also highly visceral, focusing on blood, sweat, vomit, cum, and the bodily, with varying levels of gore (with the exception of Passages which is simply sexy and sweaty, with great crop tops). The disaster bisexuals are the spark and conduits of this viscerality. Notably, all the disaster bisexuals are hot, really hot – and I am not just saying that because I am a bisexual attracted to everyone – I mean, alluring. We are meant to understand the appeal of the disaster bisexual, even as we are warned to be wary, if not afraid, of this seductive power.

On this note, it would be wrong, I think, to say that these representations of bisexuality are “bad”. This is probably my disaster bisexuality speaking, but it is way more fun to identify with the villain than have really happy unproblematic bisexual representation. And of course in selecting these films I have left out other key bisexual representations we have seen recently – such as in Heartstopper and Red, White and Royal Blue – where the bisexuals are not really chaotic at all, just attractive and nice.

My point is to question: should we “celebrate” representations of disaster bisexuals? I am not convinced. Rather, I think we should keep tabs on the disaster bisexual trope and how it is playing out, what this trope has to say about sexuality and desire, how these representations connect with broader sentiments and politics around sexuality, and perhaps most importantly, how these depictions make us bisexuals feel. As we watch, we should attend to whether it pleasurably presses the bruise, or, sometimes, digs a bit too far into the wound.

Book Review: The Modern by Anna Kate Blair

Posted on September 29, 2023 by binarythis

Dear Anna,

I have been thinking about how I might write a review of The Modern, given my love of it, but also given our prior entanglement. What are the ethics of critique when the personal is unavoidable? I am sure this is a legitimate genre of criticism and I am just being naive, but I am putting this in a letter to you (to everyone) to avoid any doubt about the conflict of interest.

When we first started dating I sent one of my friends a text: What do you do if your girlfriend turns out to be your favourite author? Wouldn’t that be wild? I will never know, we did not stay girlfriends.

You once said to me that you felt as if everything you wrote was for me, that you imagined me as the reader. I know that cannot – would not reasonably – be the case anymore, but it felt so special reading The Modern, knowing you, having known you, for some of the time that you were writing it. Against postmodernism, you as author were so alive to me in this.

I wanted to buy a copy in support, but I also narcissistically wondered if I was reflected in the text. I analysed your descriptions of Robert, Cara, Sally, Emily, and other subsidiary characters, for any hints. In fact, they all seemed more like versions of you. Maybe this is how writing always works. Everyone was much too erudite or cool or modern to feel anything like me, but on reflection I can see that some of the worst elements of my anxious-avoidant attachment style are, perhaps, in there.

I flinch, for instance, at Cara deleting all traces of Sophia on her social media: “It felt as if she was determined to erase memories of our pleasant moments, ashamed to admit that we’d spent time together, as if she was trying to create a narrative of her life in which I meant nothing”. I regret it. It made me think about how we efface surfaces when we cannot bare their depth. The desire to negate intimacy in order to stay a step ahead of rejection.

We don’t really get to know Cara in The Modern, she remains two-dimensional to the reader but hyper-real to Sophia. I think this is part of the point, an exploration of what it feels like to have an infatuation where the other person becomes a slate onto which you project. I read a review of the novel that described it as “solipsistic” but why aren’t women allowed to look in the mirror?

When you are falling in love, everything feels intertextual and full of portent. Songs playing in restaurants, whether flowers in a vase stay closed, the weather forecast – all take on special meaning. Yet I wrote in my diary I felt “haunted” by romance when we were together, that all of the beautiful things we encountered felt jarring with my internal unease. Perhaps it was, like Sophia, because I was in love with someone else. You and I talked openly about my other love, and I wondered whether your tolerance was simply because of interest in a writerly way. After The Modern, I think it is because you deeply understand the multiple directions love can pull you in simultaneously, and the odd formations that friendship can take. You have no judgement of it.

As you know, the last day with my other love involved rowing down the river to celebrate exactly one year of our friendship. As we ate our picnic floating on the water – and before I could declare my love – he played the song “Can’t We Be Friends” from his phone. I recounted all this to you later and you said it was too trite to be literary.

I cherish that this is a novel with Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan at the heart of it. Forgetting your love of them, I had serendipitously re-read Meditations on an Emergency only days before The Modern arrived in my mailbox. “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love”. Most significantly, The Modern is radical in not shying away from love as the centre of analysis. It is not a romance novel, but it is all about romance. Crushes are often understood as frivolous, juvenile, and above all, feminine. The Modern rejects none of this, treating the “unserious” with extreme care and detail. I recall you giving me Lunch Poems when we were dating. You said you had a spare copy, it was no big deal, it really meant nothing. When I leaf through it now, I have questions. “Is this love, now that the first love/has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?” Frank and Grace’s love for one another is the model of the most beautiful “unrequited”, “unrealised” love.

I met a writer at a book event recently, and she asked if I read poetry, and when and why I started reading it. I told her earnestly that there were two influences: my year eight English teacher (Mr Mansfield) on whom I had an enormous crush, and you, who asked me on our first date who my favourite poet was, and I couldn’t really answer. After that date I was determined to commit to poetry, to know it. You and I don’t talk anymore, but I still read poetry.

The Modern‘s mode – the crush as literary – is what makes it so special. I know that it has/will be compared to other melancholic novels by women (ones which I also love), but it is standalone in its occupation of queerness. While others in this genre are haunted by bisexuality (The Bell Jar), or relegate conflicts about sexual identity to the background (Conversations With Friends), The Modern addresses the complexity head-on. You capture the tensions of bisexuality so perfectly. The mixed desires, the different social scripts, sex, bodies, the longing for queerness. This, for me, makes it a bisexual novel for the ages. As Sophia reflects, “I felt too nervous to go to the Pride March alone. I lay in bed looking at photographs of women in t-shirts that read BISEXUALS ARE NOT CONFUSED. I was confused, though…”.

Primarily, The Modern is so witty. I laughed aloud so many times at the pluck of it, forced my partner to hear excerpts. I loved all of the reverent references to artworks, even those I did not know and made me feel inculte. I loved the camp obsession with the bridal, reflections on the ambivalence of marriage. I didn’t believe Robert’s ability to quote Sophia’s favourite literary texts, but it is an interesting fantasy, I too can imagine loving such a Philosophy Boy. I loved all the references to the sweet and sugary, the way you describe fireworks, the throwaway comment about Sophia only eating pink foods when she was sad, as if that is normal sad behaviour. I am reminded of the summer that we ate fairybread for lunch, your serious and dedicated whimsy.

Years ago when you told me the title of your novel, I worried that it would be unsearchable, lost in more general results. Like that band that called themselves “!!!” that no one could pronounce nor look up, whose songs have been forgotten because their punctuation was too cool.

I hope people find and read The Modern. If they don’t, I hope you keep writing anyway. I can’t wait to keep reading you.

“It is most modern to affirm someone“.

Love, H

You can read more about The Modern here and order a copy here.

Barbie Review: This Barbie is Trans

Posted on July 23, 2023 by binarythis

Note: The below review contains spoilers for the Barbie (2023) film! If you’d like a discussion that is spoiler-free (recorded before the film screened), check out my chat about bimbos and Barbies on NPR’s It’s Been a Minute with Brittany Luse.

I went and saw Barbie on opening night, and walked right back in and saw it again the next day. The hype around the film has been so immense that I felt like I was holding my breath with excitement and expectation for the whole first screening. Because Barbie is essentially two movies in one mashed together (Barbie and Ken’s stories), as well as kind-of but not-quite being a musical, and definitely a technicolour spectacle, the net result of my first viewing was overwhelm. When I saw it the next day everything made more sense, I knew what to expect. It was much more enjoyable and I highly recommend seeing it twice (or more…I’ll definitely go back).

There’s also an interesting point being made here about Barbies as judgemental mean girls

Despite the long lead up to the film’s release, and literally months of speculating about its content, I found Barbie to be so unexpected, joyously unique. I guess even with all my queer hopes I still thought that the film would be more like a traditional blockbuster, with a romantic narrative, or some easy arc to follow. What it actually feels like is an indie director being given the keys (and money) to make an expansively imaginative film, which is exactly what it is! However in being bold it was also sometimes messy, mostly because it was two distinct stories running in parallel: 1) A comedy drama about Stereotypical Barbie becoming human (an inversion of the typical moral panic around Barbie that human girls will try and become like her); AND 2) A musical about Beach Ken grappling with male entitlement and an inferiority complex. Quite different stories in both message, arc, and tone. When Ken walks off in the real world (to stumble across patriarchy), the film splits into two.

Ironically, comically, I hadn’t thought about Ken, or what his storyline might have to say about gender AT ALL in the lead up. What Gerwig gives us is a very funny meditation on contemporary white masculinity and patriarchy. Honestly Ken’s line that he wasn’t that interested in patriarchy when he realised it wasn’t about horses was so funny, I’ll be laughing about this for the rest of my life. I’ve been listening to “I’m Just Ken” on repeat. Will I buy some “I am Kenough” merch? Uh, yes. Gosling’s Ken, and the whole storyline almost steals the show from under Barbie’s flat feet, but Margot Robbie is so incredibly earnest in her performance that it’s really just a two-pronged circus the whole way through. I do wish Barbie got an equally big musical number to balance it out a bit though.

What is so wonderful about all of the scenes with the Barbies and Kens is how playful they are – as in, literally so silly that it reminds me of playing with toys as a child. The whole Ken fight scene is ridiculous but I can also completely imagine setting that up as a kid, having a war of Kens, on a beach, that turns into a Grease-like dance off where the Kens also kiss. 100% accurate.

If you need a toilet break, this is the scene to do it

The bits that truly sucked in the film were everything with the humans. The parts with the Gloria/Sascha mother/daughter storyline were so two-dimensional, mere props to further the Barbie storyline. Terrible lines. The most asinine feminist speech you can imagine. Inexplicable reactions (like when Sascha first meets Barbie). And the Ruth Handler saccharine ghost stuff? Just the worst. The Mattel humans were less boring, but really because they were more like the toys of the film, silly and hammed up, part of the melodrama, rather than boring interruptions.

I’ve also seen some critiques of the film along the lines of: this Barbie is capitalist. Gerwig tries to double-play the issue of Barbie as a consumer product, with the film nodding and winking to itself the whole way through. This is such a cheap (pun) shot at the film, because what else was Gerwig supposed to do? There is no way to make this film without that critique being levelled. I do think that this hyper-concern over consumption is reserved especially for things associated with femininity though. When the Lego film came out everyone just marvelled at its unexpected communist undertones, and then went and played with Lego. They didn’t bemoan the Lego industrial complex.

Perhaps most importantly (given my projections) the real question is: how queer and feminist is the Barbie film? Well, in terms of its internally stated feminism: lacklustre. We see some lowest common denominator feminism in the dialogue, and interestingly though patriarchy is referred to throughout, the f word is rarely mentioned as an explicit antidote. If I was writing the script, I would have had Gloria the human give the Barbies some 1970s feminist books and start consciousness-raising groups to get them out of their brainwashing, but perhaps this is just my very specific taste as someone who lectures on gender (edit: as a friend pointed out, they kind of try to do this but for a general audience — but what I’m trying to say is it’s consciousness-raising lite!). In spite of this, my hope that this film could – ought to – usher in some feminist media analysis that takes femininity seriously rather than dismissing the text as postfeminist still stands. I would also like to see Ken’s arc analysed here using critical femininity studies, not simply deferring to masculinity studies as the place to explain what is represented (perhaps another post, for another time…).

Barbie has to want to know the truth: that she’s gay

The queerness of the film is stitched into its very fabric, and not just because loads of the cast are LGBTQ+. Though Stereotypical Barbie doesn’t get to make out with any other Barbies (I would have appreciated at least ONE scissoring joke) the implication is certainly that she is queer, because she is queer-coded. From Birkenstocks, to listening to Indigo Girls, to not being interested in Ken, to identifying with “Weird” Barbie, and the Barbie cinema playing Wizard of Oz (all Barbies are “friends of Dorothy”?), the strong hint is that Barbie is not straight. “Weird” Barbie is clearly a euphemism for Queer Barbie, not least because she is played by the famously gay Kate McKinnon, and the rag-tag team she assembles in her house when patriarchy takes over Barbie land also indicates that they are a queer bunch. From Allan (Ken’s “friend”) to Magic Earring Ken and Video (aka Cyborg) Barbie, these are the queer crew, discontinued by Mattel. By the end of the film, after their power-to-patriarchy-and-back-again journey the vibe seems to be that all of the Barbies are “weird”.

You’re telling me this is a group of straight Barbies? Ah, no.

Yet it is also the transness of Barbie that comes to the fore at the very end when she realises her humanness, rather than (as Ruth tells her) having to “want” or “ask” for it. I read this as a trans allegory, where Barbie’s true self is not something she “identifies” as, but something she affirms: she just is. That the last scene involves her visiting a gynaecologist furthers this reading. We don’t know how or when Barbie got a vagina, but she’s so pleased to have one. This doesn’t seem to be a regressive suggestion, that all women ought to have certain biology – and the fact that we learn Ruth had a double mastectomy seems relevant here – but that Barbie realised she was a woman, and wanted certain genitals, which she got. I truly hope this sends the trans-exclusionary activists out there into a tailspin.

Five stars, plenty of notes, but a film I will absolutely cherish forever.

Fascists, Feminists, and ‘Gender Ideology’: A More Manageable Apocalypse

Posted on July 10, 2023 by binarythis

Below is a slightly extended version of an invited plenary panel talk I gave at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)/Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture Aus and NZ (ASLEC-ANZ) Conference, on July 6 in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the panel was “Uncertainty’s Place”. I donated my speaker’s fee for this talk to the Trans Justice Project: you can donate here.

In my talk today I want to respond to Jennifer’s provocation in the description for this plenary about the potential crossover between reactionary voices on gender and local responses to climate change. It is my hope that in elucidating the enmeshment of these voices that we might be better placed to critique them.

Pictured: examples of rhetorical overlap from conservative politicians on issues of climate inaction/denial and taking anti-trans positions

On one level, the links between reactionary voices on climate and gender might seem obvious: the actors on the right who champion the fossil fuels industry, or who deny climate change altogether, champion reactionary ideas on the topic of gender. In an Australian context we don’t have to look very hard to find examples of this, or the publications that simultaneously spruik these ideologies. However, digging into the coalition of reactionary voices on gender, the picture becomes a little more confusing, the stated positions on the environment a lot more disparate. There is a spectrum of voices in this coalition. From fascists, to traditionally conservative politicians, teaming up with with those who describe themselves as left-wing, some of whom have come out of the environment movement. Is their anti-trans agenda the only thing that unites them?

The aim of this talk isn’t to detail all of the connections between the far right and anti-trans feminists, or to consider the fascist aspects of anti-trans sentiments, as others have explored. Rather, it is to take these self-proclaimed anti-trans feminists at face value (as feminists, as left-wing) to understand what is at the philosophical root of their coalitions with the right over this issue, and, what this possibly has to do with climate change.

Pictured: anti-trans activist Posie Parker (who rejects the label “feminist”), who led the world-wide tour of the “Let women speak” rally. She is pictured here in Washington with a group of activists, where one of the signs reads “pinko pro-choice anti-racist leftists say no to gender ideology”

The shared term that has been weaponised by those voices opposing gender diversity and transgender rights, is “gender ideology”. We can understand the emergence of this opposition (this “reaction”) historically against the context of the rise of a different mobilisation of feminist activists in the past decade, many of whom are intersectional feminists, and also connected to the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, as well as struggles for LGBTQ+ rights. During this period there has been increasing articulation and media visibility of transgender people and their stories and experiences. There have also been legislative wins in rights for LGBTQ+ people broadly, such as marriage equality, and also around gender recognition and birth certificate laws. In the wake of this activism, visibility, and legislative gains, there has been backlash, from right wing evangelicals and people who call themselves radical feminists (or, “gender critical feminists”) alike.

Images 1-3: The 2017 Sao Paulo protest against Judith Butler
Image 4: The neo-Nazi group who turned up to support the “Let Women Speak” rally in Melbourne 2023

In its most right wing and fascistic formations, backlash has focused on so-called “gender ideology” as threat to the nuclear family and thereby the Nation state. For example, in 2017, far-right Christian protestors gathered in Sao Paulo to protest pre-eminent gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s appearance at a local conference, calling them a witch, burning an effigy of them, and claiming that they were out to corrupt the sexual identities of children.

As Butler reflected on this protest: “My sense is that the group who engaged this frenzy of effigy burning, stalking and harassment want to defend ‘Brazil’ as a place where LGBTQ people are not welcome, where the family remains heterosexual (so no gay marriage), where abortion is illegal and reproductive freedom does not exist. They want boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, and for there to be no complexity in questions such as these. The effort is antifeminist, antitrans, homophobic and nationalist, using social media to stage and disseminate their events. In this way, they resemble the forms of neo-fascism that we see emerging in different parts of the world.” We have also seen this fascistic element more locally, in the streets of Melbourne when neo-Nazis turned up to the Let Women Speak rally in March this year.

Left: a poster for the “Why can’t women talk about sex?” event
Right: The Binary Australia website header and logo

What we have here is essentially is a coalition of seemingly unlikely allies who are all focused on opposing rights for transgender people. Some are explicitly fascist groups. Some are conservative politicians, often evangelical. Yet some describe themselves as feminists, usually “gender critical” feminists. So, for example in June a talk was held at NSW Parliament House called “Why can’t women talk about sex?”. Speakers included a mix of conservative politicians (e.g. Louise Elliot), activists (e.g. Sal Grover, Katherine Deves), and self-described “gender critical” feminist academic Holly Lawford Smith. It was hosted by a Liberal Democrat MP and also attended by Liberal and Labor MPs. It was broadcast by a new right-wing independent digital media company called ADH TV, and promoted via Binary Australia, the group who ran the “No” campaign against marriage equality in Australia in 2017 and subsequently rebranded to focus on anti-trans issues.

Here, anti-trans activism is the hinge. When it comes to climate change and environmental issues generally within these coalitions, there is divergence. Broadly, some of those actors are climate change sceptics, others acknowledge climate change and argue for nuclear as the solution, and when it comes to the people identifying as radical or “gender critical” feminists some of them are nominally environmental activists, or have come from this movement. So for example, we have conservative Katherine Deves, who unsuccessfully ran for the Liberal party in the 2022 Federal election, who occasionally tweets about nuclear power, and indeed this issue is at the heart of Liberal party debates happening this week at the National convention. Conversely, before pivoting seemingly inexplicably to anti-trans philosophy, Holly Lawford Smith was an environmental philosopher who wrote about the moral duty of individuals to act on climate change. However, tellingly, in Lawford Smith’s 2022 book “Gender Critical Feminism”, she outlines,

“[All things] relating centrally to women’s reproductive role and gender expectations applied on the basis of her being female, will be on the feminist agenda as we’ve outlined it. But climate justice won’t be. Climate justice is an everyone issue, not a feminist issue. And that’s a good thing, because as I have been arguing, when it becomes feminism’s job to smash capitalism and fight climate change there’s a serious risk that feminism simply becomes debilitated by being stretched too thinly, by having too much asked of it” (Lawford Smith, 2022, p.159, emphasis in original). As she also reflects, “Nothing has ever seized my attention and refused to relax its grip like [gender critical] feminism has. I have cared about social justice issues, most significantly in recent years climate justice, but I have never been consumed by them” (Lawford Smith, 2022, p.208).

Image 1: The Deep Green Resistance book co-authored by Lierre Keith
Image 2: The logo for the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and an example from one of their campaigns
Image 3: An image of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and an example from one of their campaigns

I want to give one more strange, telling, example of these coalitions in the USA context, before getting to my point. In 2011 Lierre Keith, co-founded the group “Deep Green Resistance front” (DGR), a direct-action group which calls for a “world without industrial civilization” for the benefit of the environment. As their website describes, “When civilization ends, the living world will rejoice. We must be biophilic people in order to survive”. DGR also describes itself as a “radical feminist organisation” and in its statement of principles includes “Gender is not natural, not a choice, and not a feeling: it is the structure of women’s oppression. Attempts to create more ‘choices’ within the sex-caste system only serve to reinforce the brutal realities of male power”. While DGR seems to have fractured over this issue, in 2013 Lierre created another group, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). WoLF organises predominately around anti-trans issues with a stated focus on “abolishing gender ideology”. Despite being nominally in favour of abortion rights, WoLF has received funding from the conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and have co-organised rallies in the USA against trans rights. ADF’s main focus is on ending access to abortion and winding back rights for LGBTQ+ people in the USA.

As C. Libby (2022) explains in their analysis of the links between evangelicals and trans-exclusionary feminists, “Despite their distinct historical and ideological lineages, contemporary evangelical and trans-exclusionary radical feminist positions on transgender issues share an affective resonance… Anti-trans rhetoric today positions transgender rights as part of a larger ‘transgender agenda’ that threatens to endanger women and children and to strip Christians of their civil rights” (Libby, 2022, p.429).

Rather than thinking about these alliances as simply opportunistic coalitions meeting on anti-trans rights, there is something fundamentally shared at the basis of these positions. As we readily see in the WoLF and ADF examples, children are often placed at the centre of their campaigns, as the basis upon which the fight is mounted. My claim is, that what is being conceptually weaponised here, what is fundamentally being fought over is not the present moment, but rather, the future. We can productively turn to queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) here, who describes how the figure of the Child is often wielded in politics and culture as a symbol of the future, and specifically a future that is founded in the (white) heterosexual nuclear family. Edelman shows how children are symbolically connected to life and reproductive futurity, while queer people are marked as representing death and “no future”.

Image 1: A collage of anti-trans protest banners
Image 2: Katherine Deves’ Twitter header which reads “A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly [on] all that stands in its path”
Image 3: Anita Bryant (the original Posie Parker) campaigning against gay civil rights in the 1960s

We see this playing out today with constant fearmongering around the impact of “gender ideology” on children. We see this in “gender critical” calls to “save the tomboy”, to “stop child transition”, and to preserve conversion therapy practices. We see this in the fascist protests that invoke pedophilia and use images of children being “harmed” by “gender ideology”, and at their protests of drag queen story time events at libraries. We see this in the propaganda of sites like Binary Australia, who state their key aim as “protecting children”. We even see this in the social media profiles of failed politicians like Katherine Deves who paints a vivid vision of violence in the name of children. Incredibly much of the language of these protests directly invokes old “save our children” rhetoric seen for example in the USA in the 1960s, with organised campaigns against gay civil rights.

Posie Parker posing with other anti-trans activists in the UK

Yet, departing from Edelman what I’d like to point out is that we are seeing in Australia is not just the invocation of the child as the symbol of the future but the white “female” body as the carrier of that child as under threat. Much of this constructs the category of “mother” as the supreme moral arbiter of what is good and right, what is “common sense”. So for example, this piece published by Binary Australia uses the language of the stolen generation of Indigenous children in Australia’s history, washing this of its specific racist history and transposing it onto fear about “gender ideology” as “the stolen genderation”, depicting a white hand against a fence and penned by “A. Mother”. In using this title and image, what is called to mind is a kind of white genocide. When we look at the content of these articles, speeches from conservative politicians, and books by “gender criticals” what we see is a framing of women and children under immense threat: women’s bodies as being “colonised” and “erased”, and sex as being “eliminated”. While these actors may share nominally different positions on climate change, what is shared is a displacement of fear and uncertainty about the future, that is threatened by the shadow of climate change, onto a threat against children and women, with the solution founded in the presumed certainty, materiality, of the sexed body.

An example from the Binary Australia site

Relief from climate apocalypse comes in the name of fabricating a different threat, a war against culture (“gender ideology”) over nature (the sexed body, specifically white cisgender women’s bodies).

As Sophie Lewis and Asa Seresin argue in their (2022) article on the connection between fascism and feminism in today’s anti-trans activism, the view of anti-trans activists amounts to “…an extinction fantasy narrative” or “apocalyptic intoxication”. As Lewis suggests: “I suppose what I am claiming is that the millenarian emergency of ‘female erasure’ imagined by Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, and Janice Raymond is an imminent disaster the cisterhood loves, Cassandra-like, to hate” (p.470). Very similarly Libby (2022) highlights how evangelical pamphlets condemning transgender subjectivity stress “moral decay, contagion, and apocalypticism” (2022, p.426).

The reactionary voices in question are fighting for a construction of the future that is certain: where “boys are boys” and “girls are girls”, where this is founded in a biological guarantee, imagined as a concrete and immutable reality. In the meantime, the status quo can continue without having to challenge the logics of capitalist industrial growth, consumption, or emissions. This is not just the logical consequence of the politics of conservative actors in this coalition against “gender ideology”. In constructing “gender critical” feminism as a “single axis” politics that rejects so-called “burdens” of other axes such as race and class, or concerns like environmentalism (Lawford Smith, 2022, p.58), it cannot help but leave a vacuum for its coalition partners to fill on other issues, precisely because it is purportedly concerned with nothing other than “sex”. Vitally, it promotes climate inaction because they are too focused on fighting a confected culture war. Disaffection, defeatism, and opportunism come together to spectacularly imagine a whole new threat.

Crucially, as Gayle Rubin wrote in 1982, when the fear was nuclear war and the battle was the so-called feminist “sex wars” over pornography and kink, “…it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality… Disputes over sexual behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity” (p.137-138). Though in this case now it is gender, “gender ideology” is suffused with a sense of the sexual order under threat. Why sexuality? Because when the future is imperilled – as it is now, with the very real apocalypse of climate change looming overhead – reproduction, imagined as the future of the species, becomes an easy latch, a more manageable apocalypse.

Waxing Frida

Posted on July 6, 2023 by binarythis

I’ve been thinking a lot about Frida Kahlo lately, as I’ve been asked to speak at the Art Gallery of South Australia’s panel on Frida’s feminist legacy later this week, as part of their “Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution” exhibition. Today, incidentally, is her birthday.

Turning my attention to Frida is a return to childhood for me, when she was a key source of comfort. This was during the rise of “Fridamania”: which spanned from influencing designers like Gaultier in the 1990s, to Salma Hayek’s 2002 biopic, and being famously loved by Madonna in this period. But from memory it wasn’t pop culture so much as my mother who introduced me to Frida, and the reason? My thick monobrow.

Frida’s stoic and defiant self portraits were the only positive imagery I had of anyone with a monobrow. There was literally no other representation I could find, no Internet to search, no monobrows in magazines or on television unless there was a reference to a character being deeply annoying, ugly, sinister, or cringeworthy (despite a brief media blip about a model growing a monobrow in 2018, things definitely haven’t changed on this front).

Because of Frida I could mostly stand these depictions. Feeling self-conscious I would leaf through the accordion book of Frida’s self portraits my mother had given me, I would recall her paintings that I had seen myself at the National Gallery in 2001. In primary school I would pre-empt scorn by joking to people “I can raise one eyebrow, wanna see?!”

Despite her psychic assistance, and even as Frida’s star image was rising in the popular imagination, the hegemony of two-brow dominance was too much to bear by the time I reached high school. As a teenager Frida came to feel like an awkward relative I didn’t want to associate with, or shameful interior self. I plucked her away, pruning my hair back to little and far-apart slugs.

Seeking repair for my zealous plucking, I went to a beautician and explained. I remember saying “you must see a lot of monobrows” and she just looked at me blankly. It’s a memory soaked with humiliation, and looking back at the pictures of myself in these period fills me with profound sadness, the shame with which I carried my body in the world as if I wanted to hide away.

I have been particularly horrified to find that several of the popular books for sale about Frida today (such as “Frida: A to Z“) depict Frida with two eyebrows, and certainly no moustache. This is in spite of the fact that these publications explicitly contain sections discussing the significance of Frida’s monobrow and hair to her constructed image: the way she would enhance her brow with pencil and gel, and emphasise her facial hair in her portraiture.

Perhaps the artistic teams on these books missed the memo, but it seems to me as if she’s been run through a filter of palatability, to suggest that her star as a style icon is only possible by bringing her closer to white patriarchal femininity rather than representing her subversive femme Mexican self-construction. Similarly, when a Barbie version of Frida was released in 2018, she was given a barely-there brow, whitened skin, and an inauthentic style of dress.

The circulation of Frida’s image today feels like a photocopy of a photocopy, a girl-boss-ification that focuses on her glamour, with occasional side notes on her sexual and gender queerness, communism, or pain. She’s on tote bags and tarot decks, and children’s books that simply note her posthumous triumph as an icon. Whether the monobrow is there on not, Frida the artist is often stripped away in favour of Frida the pop-art-like screen print.

Returning to Frida as an adult I feel desperate to understand her, to appreciate her in her complexity and for her artistry. To be as bold as her. As a child I didn’t understand the weight behind Frida’s bloody and bodily paintings, that it wasn’t all about her face. I didn’t comprehend Frida’s accident as a teenager, her chronic pain, infertility and child loss, the importance of her Mexican identity, her communism, her bisexuality, even though so much of this is communicated in her paintings. Recently I bought my young daughter a children’s book about Frida, and though the monobrow is there, the retelling is saccharine: Frida was sad in some of her paintings, but smiling in others! Frida loved life! What does it take to be a feminist icon? Why is it so hard for pain, queer love, loss, to be part of the narrative?

I suspect that even if I had understood Frida more holistically as a child, as more than her monobrow, it would not have been enough to keep the tweezers away.

I sit here fantasising about a future monobrow, un-waxing Frida. I fear there is a gap now that can never grow back.

Bimbo Feminism: Why I’m Excited About the Barbie Movie

Posted on April 6, 2023 by binarythis

If you (somehow??) haven’t heard, there’s a live action Barbie film coming out in July this year, and it looks incredible.

The film has Greta Gerwig at the helm, who brought us previous meditations on femininity including Frances Ha, Lady Bird, and Little Women (seriously someone come do a PhD with me on her oeuvre). Plus it’s co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach who brought us exceedingly depressing reflections on the precarity of the nuclear family with The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story. With this indie pair in charge you know Barbie is going to be magic.

But the reason I’m most excited isn’t just because it involves two of my favourite filmmakers, and an all-star cast. It’s because I genuinely hope that this film ushers in a new era of critical feminist analysis that takes femininity seriously as a point of theorisation, not so easily written off as “postfeminism”. Maybe we’ll call it “bimbo feminism”. I’ll explain.

Barbie is one of those fraught icons of hyperfemininity. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose caregivers were reluctant about Barbies. I get it. I’ve written recently about how kids clothes are gendered in absurd ways and “for girls” often becomes code for “impractical”. As an icon of girl culture Barbie can get caught up in this. My grandmother gave me a Barbie card for my seventh birthday, and inside there was a message along the lines of “I didn’t get you one because Barbies are sexist” (I’m not joking).

Eventually someone got me a Barbie (“Lights and Lace” Barbie), and I also procured some from an op-shop. I cut Lights and Lace Barbie’s hair short and she lived with her girlfriend in a suitcase apartment with their Barbie cat, and a Ken doll (who was also gay). Do straight Barbies even exist?

On the one hand, Barbie has been abundantly critiqued as an emblem of unrealistic and patriarchal beauty standards. On the other, people have pointed out that she’s done every occupation, and is the ultimate girlboss (eww). On the third, and much more interesting hand, the way people have actually played with Barbies, remixing their hair, outfits, personas and sexualities, reveals Barbie as the GOAT bimbo icon: a blank slate, a fantasy of femininity. She is spectacular plastic with nothing, and thereby everything, to say.

Since the 1990s, feminist critique in the academy has become dominated by dubbing things “postfeminist”. It’s a debated term, but essentially refers to media depictions (or what Ros Gill calls a “sensibility”) that depict feminism as done-and-dusted, within a broader cultural context of backlash against feminism. A LOT of early discussions of postfeminism focused on sex-interested or hyper-feminine female characters as evidencing post-feminism (e.g. via films like Bridget Jones’ Diary or Legally Blonde). Because of the rise of popular feminism in the 2010s, postfeminism is now used a little more expansively to describe an ideology that circulates in popular culture that undermines feminist gains, or is regressive in some way. Problem is, what is dubbed postfeminist/regressive can’t shake the hang up on sexiness and femininity.

Since the 2010s there has also been a parallel development in academia called Critical Femininities (CF). The idea of this field is to give serious attention to studying femininities (in much the same way that masculinity studies has become a proper field), critically but not dismissing femininity as merely, easily, or only patriarchal. CF has been championed largely by queer femme scholars, by people who know what it feels like to be perceived as straight-conforming or not “queer enough” simply because of their feminine gender expression. I have been so excited to see recent CF analyses revisiting “postfeminist” texts like Legally Blonde and the Spice Girls, and arguing for the radical elements of the spectacular femininity therein. For example (and I could quote the whole paper here), Maya Padan’s (2023) close reading of the Spice Girls as pseudo drag queens argues:

The band underscores the performativity of femme embodiments, while using the spices to enable a self-aware inquiry of femininity as a choice, rather than patriarchal coercion. In doing so, the Spice Girls stress how meaningful playfulness is to the construction of gender and how gender can be an arena of exploration (2023, p.13).

Similarly, as Sarah Kornfield and Chloe Long (2023) suggest in their analysis of The Bold Type TV show, “patriarchal and capitalist pressures work to devalue and regulate femininity and to commodify and objectify fem(me)inine people”. In response, they offer “femme analysis [that] resists patriarchy and its interlocking oppressions without positioning women, femmes, or spectacular femininity as patriarchy’s dupes” (2023, p.13).

I love these analyses because they don’t dismiss the rubric of postfeminism as useful, but also offer other ways to engage with spectacular femininity, namely from queer perspectives. One limitation of these account is that they sometimes fly a little too close to “choice feminism” for me, through emphasising “femininity as choice”. The problem with choice feminism is that in responding to the “dupes” argument, it can bend the stick too far in the other direction (I am often guilty of this).

This is where I think bimbo feminism could come in.

Since 2020, interest in bimbo-ism has gained traction via TikTok. There are endless explainers you can look up, but essentially the bimbo movement has been about: embracing styles otherwise derided as hyperfeminine, hypersexual, and/or girly, and emphasising vapidity, that is, feeling over thinking. In other words, celebrating oneself as “hot and dumb”, and encouraging pleasure and leisure over uneven heterosexual relationships and the girlboss grind. Despite their professed anti-thinking attitude, the bimbos of TikTok offer explicit critiques of capitalism, right-wing politics, heteronormativity, white feminism and trans-exclusionary feminism. This is bimbo feminism.

Of course until recently “bimbo” has almost always been used as a pejorative, that’s really the whole point of the reclamation. Some aren’t convinced by the politics of the new bimbo-ism. This morning Jessica DeFino – ex-beauty influencer turned anti-beauty blogger – wrote in her newsletter “From what I’ve seen, the reclamation of ‘bimbo’ by cisgender women essentially means using your words to promote the values of the political left while using your aesthetics to promote the excess of capitalism”. I can (and will) write a whole book about the limits of DeFino’s straight-gaze anti-beauty critique, but her take down of bimbos really misses the (radical) forest for the (pink) trees. For DeFino, hyperfeminine aesthetics “taint” the possibility of real politics. Since when is “using your words to promote the values of the political left” a bad thing just because you’ve got a full face of makeup? And why is spectacular femininity the ultimate signifier of “the excess of capitalism”?

CFS scholar Rhea Ashley Hoskin has written extensively about how intensely femininity is policed, so that it is not “too much”. Femininity is systematically devalued, it is seen as synonymous with “subordination”. Femininity is always seen as being done “for men”. This is, Hoksin argues, “femmephobia”.

As she suggests: “femininity is not taken seriously, it is trivialized, it is considered not very credible, false, untrustworthy, with ulterior motives, anti-feminist and not very intelligent”.

The negative use of the term “bimbo” is after all wielded in such a way to take down people who are perceived as too feminine, too sexual, too vapid, too excessive in their gender presentation.

I’m sure that scholars in the 2000s would look at bimbo feminism and call it “postfeminism” but for me the term has reached saturation. I’m post-postfeminism, I want what’s next.

I feel like the Barbie movie is going to deliver the goods. It’s going to take femininity seriously. Based on the trailers I’m fully expecting a queer critique of capitalism and heteronormativity while dressed in pink glitter.

That’s bimbo feminism.

For the love of dresses

Posted on February 1, 2023 by binarythis

When I was small I distinctly remember having fights with my mother about wearing dresses. While some other queer friends have recounted similar fights, my desire was not to reject dresses that were foisted on me, but rather, I deeply desired dresses while my mother wanted me to wear the more practical and much warmer option of track pants. After lots of fighting (screaming? Tantrums? It’s a kindergarten memory blur) we compromised: dresses over pants. Sartorially questionable, but enough for me to feel like I was wearing the “right” clothing. I think the obsession might have dovetailed with a girl from school asking if I was a boy, and me running home chanting to myself “I’m a girl I’m a girl I’m a girl”.

Despite my awareness, now, of the clear cultural pressures informing my desire, I still love dresses.

I once even created a blog detailing all of the 47 dresses in my closet, the stories behind all of them, and a record of wearing them all in a single month to raise money for charity (which culminated in me wearing a giant gold 1980s prom dress on a teaching day).

Recently, I bought a dress online because it reminded me of one that I wore to my uncle’s wedding when I was around seven or eight. Of course what I loved then – blaring floral design in primary colours and a 1990s design – doesn’t really translate into my style now. I refer to it as my “Pavlova Mum” dress, the kind of dress you wear when you’ve just baked a pav for the BBQ. Dresses have become symbolically central to my psychic grappling with identity and femininity and I suppose that the “Pavlova Mum” dress-naming hints at my anxieties about becoming a parent who lives in the suburbs. Though, my partner pointed out that it is also reminiscent of the final gown in Midsommar, which makes me like it a little more.

I’ve spent over a decade of my academic career unpacking and untangling my relationship to femininity, thinking through how femininity can be queer, and the confusing and messy space between cultural expectations of femininity and the desire for feminine embodiment. I thought I had come to some kind of resting place with this tension, which might be summed up something like: yes to the capacitating joys of feminine expression, no to the incapacitating expectations of femininity. But I’ve been plagued by these questions (ESPECIALLY thoughts about dresses) since I spent the last year raising a now one-year-old.

I am watching the world “girl” her in real time. Babies are, unsurprisingly, quite genderqueer little creatures. Often balding post-birth, they are little potatoes that are becoming human. They are learning to use their bodies (to know that they even have bodies), which are growing at an astonishing rate. Babies are all about transformation, becoming, and capacity. The gender designations of “boy” and “girl” seem wildly arbitrary in these early times. Yet. Walk into most children’s clothing stores and you will see the segregation of clothes by the gender binary. Shop attendants will ask you the gender of your child. Parents are sold headbands to cover their bare baby girls’ heads. Since watching the latest season of The White Lotus I have been HAUNTED by the line that Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya utters as a kind of self-explanation for her passivity and unhappiness:

“You know, when I was a little girl, my mother used to dress me up like a little doll. And I was always a little doll, waiting for someone to play with me“

In an attempt to align with my theoretical values around femininity, when it comes to clothes – questions of gender presentation and how the world “reads” you – my intent as a parental dresser has not been gender “neutrality” but rather gender experimentation and options. But try as I might to go shopping for baby clothes with the mindset that “anything goes” I have struggled, deeply struggled, to shop from the “girls” sections of shops. Unless you’re second hand shopping or looking at a designer children’s boutique (often online, very high price points), this is what those sections look like in real terms at chain stores in Australia:

	“FOR BOYS”	“FOR GIRLS”
Fit	Loose, long	Tight, short
Pockets	Frequently	Rarely
Colours	Dark or neutral – e.g. black, green, blue, grey	Pastel or bright – e.g. pink, white, yellow, purple
Volume	Straight cut	Puffy/billowy/flowy
Sunsmart	Frequently	Rarely (e.g. short sleeves)
Frills	No	Frequently
Buttons	Rarely	Frequently
Fabrics	Hardy	Often delicate (e.g. loose weave knit)
Prints	Dogs, elephants, giraffes, dinosaurs, lions, crocodiles, trucks	Unicorns, cats, flowers, rainbows, ladybirds, rabbits, fruit

The above table is based on my own observations but I’m not imagining it: a study recently conducted in Germany studied 20,000 items of children’s clothing and found that shorts “for girls” are shorter and slogans “for boys” were about being active while “for girls” were about emotions and dreaming. Sometimes these differences are benign and are simply signifying colours, but at other times they are extremely ideological (as the jumpers from the “boys” and “girls” sections of a popular chain below demonstrate).

The thing that I tend to get stuck on the most however is how impractical clothing “for girls” is. Watching my child learning to walk, it is obvious that dresses in particular can be quite incapacitating. “Girls” shorts are shorter, pants tighter, sleeves more clumsy or not covering enough in the sun (as another example below illustrates).

Many a shopping trip has ended with me in a rage, and only purchasing dull clothes from the “boys” section. Of course you can just shop for whatever clothes you like but the point is the very madness of the division in the first place.

That there are these gendered differences in children’s clothing is not new news. It’s a point so obvious to anyone that cares about gender that it feels banal to be bringing it up (again). Yet, I am compelled to bang the proverbial drum of my keyboard to shout look! Are you seeing this! Why is it still like this!

When I’ve shared these thoughts online however, many people are also fixated on the colours and patterns. The pink! The prints! They say. I’ve also found myself internally screaming at frills.

I have to step back and remind myself of my own writing, and theorising on femininity. Because it’s rarely the pink or decoration that is the problem. It is the question of what these clothes capacitate. In an ideal world the segregation of clothes by gender would be abolished, and everyone would have access to pink and frills (though not baby headbands they are simply choking hazards please throw them in the bin) and no one would have to trip over baggy laced sacks while burning their shoulders in the sun.

Then I have to step back, again, and remind myself of my love of dresses.

I brought up this conundrum with a friend and she told me not to overthink it, that my child would assert her own desires with clothes at some point. I’m just acutely aware that none of this is in a vacuum, and I am woefully brought back to the same position my mother was in when I fought with her so hard, a concern for practicality.

I’ll make sure there are dresses on offer. They might just require pants underneath.

Woman Culture and the Gendering of Pregnancy

Posted on October 24, 2021 by binarythis

Got to be honest not 100% sure what’s going on in those wrappers

Lecturing in gender studies I have spent a lot of time talking about how children are exposed to processes of gendering, how these operations are intensely social, and that learning about gender does not happen in a parent-centred vacuum. This happens immediately from birth (with the declaration “it’s a boy!” etc), and as Judith Butler (1990) usefully points out, the distinction often made between sex (the biological: including genitalia, chromosomes and other sex markers) and gender (assumed as the cultural interpretation of those markers) is blurry:

“…perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all”

This gendering can even start pre-birth, at the ultrasound, or with blood tests to determine chromosomes. Once sex is designated, an intense process is kicked into gear that involves expectations of how a child will act, what they will wear, and what their future holds (primary assumptions being, for example, that a baby designated female will be feminine, grow up to be a woman, and will one day partner with a man). As I have also discovered being pregnant, there are a whole set of gendered assumptions made between the physical experience of childbearing and the child itself – for example the idea that craving sweets means you are having a girl [*eye roll forever*]!

While I have often thought about gendering in childhood, I have attended less to how pregnancy itself is enrolled in a process of gendering adulthood. What I have experienced as a pregnant person this year has given me some insight into how intensely pregnancy is tied to the category “woman”, and in turn bound up with extremely fixed notions about biology, gender and destiny.

From vitamins to pregnancy tests, the pink and blue coding is inescapable

While I am a bisexual/queer person I am also for all intents and purposes cisgender: I am feminine presenting, use she/her pronouns, and that matches up with the expectation of being assigned female at birth (or, as I am told the pronouncement at my birth was “it’s a feminist!”…something to unpack another time). And yet, I have found the “woman culture” – or what might be more accurately termed “female culture”, emphasising biology – of pregnancy profoundly disorienting.

My first real confrontation with this (aside from the pink and blue aesthetics and white smiling women and babies of pregnancy tests and pregnancy vitamins) was at an early ultrasound. The clinic, like basically everything around pregnancy, emphasised that it was for “women” not only in its name but in every clinical detail. This included the fact I could only find a women’s bathroom there and was made to put on a smock pre-exam that was less neutral gown than actual v-neck lined puffy-sleeved purple dress. The main reception room featured a photograph of a huge pair of high heels with a caption (I’m paraphrasing here): “When the shoes didn’t fit her daughter, the mother simply reminded her she wouldn’t need toes when she was a princess”.

There is a huge emphasis on nature and the natural in pregnancy (never mind how many people used to die in pregnancy and childbirth pre-modern medicine…)

My partner, a man (*constantly* referred to in my pregnancy books and apps as my “husband” despite the fact we are unmarried…), was not allowed to come to the clinic with me and has not been allowed to any of my appointments so far, even with me crying and pleading on the phone about it after some complications, or when I had to go in for an emergency scan. While this has ostensibly been due to COVID-19 restrictions, it has not only intensely reinforced the sense that the responsibility of childbearing is mine alone, but that I am doing this as a (cis) WOMAN whose “body was made to do this” (a saying repeated over and over again to me). It has been distressing for both me and my partner to be separated in this process, and I can only imagine the homophobic layer that partners of the same gender would feel with one parent being constantly cast out.

I am not so disoriented by the physical transition of pregnancy when it comes to gender, despite the discomfort and pain – for me personally it is fun and interesting to have a growing belly, larger breasts, a body full of more blood, and I often think about how not everyone that wants to have this experience gets to. I feel very privileged. I just cannot stand the grate of being told this experience is about divine femininity that connects all (cis) women, that a (cis) woman’s identity is forged through the fires of childbirth, and that pregnancy and labour is some kind of secret business that only (cis) women can discuss with one another.

Fighting stigma and shame around periods does not have to be achieved through emphasising “womanhood”

It reminds me of when I first got my period at 14 and I was happy to have reached the puberty milestone, but also did not think much of it. My mum got really angry at me for not taking it more seriously as the transition to “womanhood” that it represented. She wanted me to celebrate. Her approach was informed by a feminism aiming to reclaim bodily processes which had been shamed and repudiated by patriarchy for centuries. But I did not feel shame, I just wanted to get on with it, and did not want to hold a party for my “entry into womanhood”. There’s a lot of feminist emphasis these days on things like periods and pregnancy because of the stigma that has otherwise surrounded them. That is totally understandable. What is harder to compute is why this has to be enrolled into a “female culture” that emphasises one’s status as woman at every turn.

It would be so easy to use gender neutral language around pregnancy, like referring to “pregnant people” rather than “pregnant women”. It would not harm anyone, it would not “erase women”, it would simply make these spaces more inclusive, and unravel the hard knot of essentialism that pervades reproductive culture. I suspect that many cisgender women enjoy having womanhood emphasised in these spaces though precisely because the misogyny of patriarchal culture means women are rarely celebrated, and pregnancy is one of the few times where one becomes a kind of special icon (where people congratulate you, make room for you on the bus, etc). However the way to resolve this issue is not to double-down on the mother-woman-biology matrix, especially given that ever more queer, trans and non-binary people are bearing children. Given the “female culture” of pregnancy it really is no surprise that it is mother-forum sites like “mumsnet” in the UK that have become the epicentre of anti-trans discourse.

Last night my partner and I re-watched Jeanie Finlay’s (2019) documentary “Seahorse” about one trans man’s experience of pregnancy. I wanted to watch it as I been reading about labour and could not think of any other cultural representations of active labour (aka how it actually happens, not the Hollywood kind where a person gives birth lying on their back). Watching Freddie’s journey through pregnancy as a now pregnant person was so soothing to me, untethered as it was from the “female culture” that has soaked every other pregnancy text I have encountered so far. Importantly in the film Freddie emphasises that his experience is *not* the same as cisgender women, precisely because of the gender dysphoria and difficult social expectations he has to navigate as a pregnant man. There is a scene where Freddie goes through all of the documents from his midwife that emphasise “mother” and “woman” and “female”, and replaces them with words that match up to his experience. Today Freddie is still fighting in court to be recognised on his child’s birth certificate as “father” or “parent”, rather than “mother”. “Seahorse” is a reminder of the small things that we could change culturally that would make a huge difference to the myriad of people experiencing pregnancy, and to thinking about gender broadly.

For now I will keep trying to find a way to navigate this fraught terrain and trying to connect with my body while holding the intense gendering at bay. I suspect this will only become more difficult, in becoming “mother”, and all of the expectations carried with that. Thinking about how we can better support people going through the gamut of reproduction without insisting on rigid gender boxes is a must on the way to loosening the grip of gender expectations in adulthood.

Trans legitimacy, existence and resistance in academia – a small selection of peer-reviewed scholarship in trans studies

Posted on February 17, 2021 by binarythis

The confected “debate” about the legitimacy of trans lives does not seem to be going away, and indeed is becoming a key feature of the culture wars in Australia and abroad. In recent years a small group of activists have rebranded themselves “Gender Critical (GC) Feminists” (distancing themselves from the term “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF)”, which they claim is a slur). Despite being marginal in their views around trans rights, GC activists continue to receive a huge amount of media attention and platforming, often in the conservative press (but sometimes also, sadly, in outlets such as The Guardian and The Conversation). Many GC activists also continue to hold senior positions in the academy, which adds legitimacy to their public commentary, despite the fact that very few of them have any expertise in gender studies and many have no peer reviewed publications on trans issues.

When we delve into the arguments of GC activists many outright deny the legitimate existence of trans people altogether, claiming, for example, that “our problem is with male people claiming to be women, regardless of how they present”. GC activists then must be understood not simply as “trans-exclusionary”, but as trans deniers.

It is absolutely crucial that media outlets and universities begin to recognise that like climate denial, trans denial is based on unscientific views that are wildly out of step with peer-reviewed scholarship. When GC activists suggest that trans rights ought to be “debated” on the basis of “free speech”, they set the terms of a highly uneven debate between their ideological perspectives vs. actual scholarship. If we focus on the actual scholarship, we see that there are many debates to be had in trans studies around identity, embodiment, race, decolonisation, the relation to non-binary identity, research methods, and more, but those discussions are completely annihilated by GC feminists suggesting that the debate should be about the very legitimacy of trans people in the first place.

In response to this outrageous and fabricated debate, I present (below) a very short introductory list of peer-reviewed scholarship in the field of trans studies that might be used to rebut the entirely unsupported claims of GC feminists, to illuminate the vast depths of the field of trans studies, and to illustrate to the media and universities alike that the “debates” are to be found elsewhere from where GC feminists claim. This is by no means an exhaustive list – there are literally thousands of articles on trans studies, and more are published each day. (There is, of course, much amazing writing published by trans people outside of the academy, my point here though being that trans studies is a huge field of academic scholarship, a point mostly overlooked in public “debates”).

If you would like to view/download a copy of this list please click here. If you think something should be added to this short list of peer-reviewed scholarship (or removed) please contact me.

Journals/special issues and key texts/readers (rebuttal to claims of “trans orthodoxy” – trans studies is not mere political polemics, it is an established and legitimate field of study)

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq

International Journal of Transgender Health https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wijt21/current

Women’s Studies Quarterly (2008) 36(3/4) Special Issue on ‘Trans-’ edited by P. Currah, L. J. Moore & S. Stryker https://www.jstor.org/stable/i27649777

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1998) 4(2) Special Issue on ‘The Transgender Issue’ edited by S. Stryker https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/issue/4/2

Hypatia (2009) 24(3) Special Issue on ‘Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities’ edited by T.M. Bettcher & A. Garry https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15272001/2009/24/3

Gender, Place & Culture (2010) 17(5) Special theme on ‘Trans Geographies’ edited by K. Browne, C. J. Nash & S. Hines https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503104

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014) 1(3) Special Issue on ‘Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary’ edited by A. Aizura, M. Ochoa, S. Vidal-Ortiz, T. Cotton, C. Balzer/C. LaGata https://www.dukeupress.edu/decolonizing-the-transgender-imaginary-1

S. Stryker & S. Whittle (eds) (2006) The Transgender Studies Reader. London: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/The-Transgender-Studies-Reader/Stryker-Whittle/p/book/9780415947091

S. Stryker & A.Z. Aizura (2013) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/The-Transgender-Studies-Reader-2/Stryker-Aizura/p/book/9780415517737

A. Haefele-Thomas (2019) Introduction to Transgender Studies. Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/introduction-to-transgender-studies/9781939594273

S. Hines & T. Sanger (eds) (2010) Transgender identities: Towards a social analysis of gender diversity. New York: Routledge https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37306

D. Spade (2015) Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, & the limits of law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press http://www.deanspade.net/books/normal-life/

G. Salamon (2010) Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/assuming-a-body/9780231149587

J. Halberstam (2018) Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. University of California Press https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520292697/trans

J. Serano (2007) Whipping Girl: Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/julia-serano/whipping-girl/9781580056229/

K. Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (eds) (2010) Gender outlaws: the next generation. Berkeley: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/kate-bornstein/gender-outlaws/9781580053778/

C. Richards, W.P. Bouman & M-J. Barker (eds) (2017) Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders. London: Palgrave Macmillan https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137510525

Trans theory and history (rebuttal to the claim that trans is an entirely ‘new’ concept – while some terms have changed over time, trans theory continues to grow and change)

S. Stryker (2017). Transgender History, Second Edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. Berkeley: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/susan-stryker/transgender-history-second-edition/9781580056908/

S. Stone ([1987] 2006) ‘The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto’. In The transgender studies reader, Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (eds). New York: Routledge https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/trans-manifesto.pdf

J. Prosser (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/second-skins/9780231109345

T. Ellison, K. M. Green, M. Richardson, C. Riley Snorton (2017) ‘We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies’, TSQ, 4(2): 162–169 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814949

S. Stryker (2004) ‘Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin’, GLQ, 10(2): 212–215 https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10-2-212

J. Halberstam (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press https://nyupress.org/9780814735855/in-a-queer-time-and-place/

L. Feinberg (1998) Trans liberation: beyond pink or blue. Boston: Beacon Press https://www.worldcat.org/title/trans-liberation-beyond-pink-or-blue/oclc/607065169

S. Stryker (2008) ‘Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity’, Radical History Review, (100): 145–157 https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2007-026

P. Califia (1997) Sex changes: the politics of transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press https://www.worldcat.org/title/sex-changes-the-politics-of-transgenderism/oclc/36824894

V. K. Namaste (2000) Invisible lives: The erasures of transsexual and transgendered people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3683192

C. M. Keegan (2020) ‘Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?’, Journal of Homosexuality, 67(3): 384-397 https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885

C. Adair, C. Awkward-Rich & A. Marvin (2020) ‘Before Trans Studies’, TSQ, 7(3): 306-320 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8552922

M. Day (2020) ‘Indigenist Origins: Institutionalizing Indigenous Queer and Trans Studies in Australia’, TSQ, 7(3): 367–373 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8553006

Transfeminist approaches (rebuttal to the claim that feminism and trans studies are incompatible – these texts look at the tensions between feminist and trans studies from transfeminist perspectives)

A. F. Enke (Ed.) (2012) Transfeminist perspectives: In and beyond transgender and gender studies, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt8sf

E. Koyama ([2000] 2020) ‘Whose feminism is it anyway? The unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate’, The Sociological Review, 68(4): 735-744, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120934685

V. Varun Chaudhry (2020) ‘On Trans Dissemblance: Or, Why Trans Studies Needs Black Feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(3): 529-535 https://doi.org/10.1086/706466

M. Nanney & D.L. Brunsma (2017) ‘Moving Beyond Cis-terhood: Determining Gender through Transgender Admittance Policies at U.S. Women’s Colleges’, Gender & Society, 31(2): 145-170 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243217690100

S. Stryker (2007) ‘Transgender Feminism’. In S. Gillis, G. Howie & R. Munford (eds) Third Wave Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593664_5

V. Namaste (2009) ‘Undoing theory: The “transgender question” and the epistemic violence of Anglo-American feminist theory’, Hypatia, 24(3): 11–32 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20618162

C. Heyes (2003) ‘Feminist solidarity after queer theory: The case of transgender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (4): 1093–120 https://doi.org/10.1086/343132

C. Awkward-Rich (2017) ‘Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(4): 819-841 https://doi.org/10.1086/690914

A. Tudor (2019) ‘Im/possibilities of refusing and choosing gender’, Feminist Theory, 20(4): 361-380 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119870640

S. Hines (2019) ‘The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism’, Journal of Gender Studies, 28(2): 145-157 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1411791

Trans harassment, discrimination, erasure, surveillance (rebuttal to the claim that trans people are villains/perpetrators rather than a highly surveilled and persecuted minority – these texts provide empirical evidence and analysis of the issues faced by trans people and communities)

T. Beauchamp (2019) Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Durham: Duke University Press https://www.dukeupress.edu/going-stealth

B. Colliver & A. Coyle (2020) ‘“Risk of sexual violence against women and girls” in the construction of “gender-neutral toilets”: a discourse analysis of comments on YouTube videos’, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 4(3): 359-376(18), https://doi.org/10.1332/239868020X15894511554617

K. Bender-Baird (2016) ‘Peeing under surveillance: bathrooms, gender policing, and hate violence’, Gender, Place & Culture, 23(7): 983-988 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1073699

J. James (2021) ‘Refusing abjection: transphobia and trans youth survivance’, Feminist Theory, 22(1): 109-128 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120974896

C.L. Quinan (2017) ‘Gender (In)Securities: Surveillance and Transgender Bodies in a Post-9/11 Era of Neoliberalism’. In M. Leese & S. Wittendorp (eds), Security/Mobility Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 153-169 https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526108364/9781526108364.xml

A. Lubitow, JD. Carathers, M. Kelly & M. Abelson (2017) ‘Transmobilities: mobility, harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland, Oregon’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(10): 1398-1418, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1382451

K. Kraschel (2012) ‘Trans-cending space in women’s only spaces: Title IX cannot be the basis for exclusion’, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, 35: 463-85 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2138896

T. Spence‐Mitchell (2021) ‘Restroom restrictions: How race and sexuality have affected bathroom legislation’, Gender Work Organisation https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12545

M. A. Case (2019) ‘Trans Formations in the Vatican’s War on “Gender Ideology”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44:3, 639-664 https://doi.org/10.1086/701498

R. Rosenberg & N. Oswin (2015) ‘Trans embodiment in carceral space: hypermasculinity and the US prison industrial complex’, Gender, Place & Culture, 22(9): 1269-1286 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.969685

P. L. Doan (2010) ‘The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 635-654 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503121

C.L. Quinan, D. Cooper, V. Molitor, A. Kondakov, A. van der Vleuten & T. Zimenkova (2020) ‘“State Regimes of Gender: Legal Aspects of Gender Identity Registration, Trans-Relevant Policies and Quality of LGBTIQ Lives”: A Roundtable Discussion’, International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law, 1 (1): 377-402 https://doi.org/10.19164/ijgsl.v1i1.985

D. Irving (2015) ‘Performance Anxieties: Trans Women’s Un(der)-employment Experiences in Post-Fordist Society’, Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83): 50-64 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2014.99845

Negotiating trans identity/lived experience (rebuttal to the claim that trans identity is not legitimate – despite attempts at erasure, trans people continue to exist and resist)

A. Rooke (2010) T’rans youth, science and art: creating (trans) gendered space’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 655-672 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503124

T.J. Jourian, S.L. Simmons, K.C. Devaney (2015) ‘“We Are Not Expected”: Trans* Educators (Re)Claiming Space and Voice in Higher Education and Student Affairs’, TSQ, 2(3): 431–446 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2926410

S. Hines (2010) ‘Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 597-613 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503116

I. Linander, I. Goicolea, E. Alm, A. Hammarström & L. Harryson (2019) ‘(Un)safe spaces, affective labour and perceived health among people with trans experiences living in Sweden’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 21(8): 914-928, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2018.1527038

A. Gorman-Murray, S. McKinnon, D. Dominey-Howes, C. J. Nash & R.Bolton (2018) ‘Listening and learning: giving voice to trans experiences of disasters’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(2): 166-187 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1334632

S. Hines (2007) ‘(Trans)Forming Gender: Social Change and Transgender Citizenship’, Sociological Research Online, 12(1):181-194 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1469

C. T. Sullivan (2018) ‘Majesty in the city: experiences of an Aboriginal transgender sex worker in Sydney, Australia’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(12): 1681-1702 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1553853

M. J. Andrucki & D. J. Kaplan (2018) ‘Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(6): 781-798 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1457014

O. Jenzen (2017) ‘Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(11): 1626-1641 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1396204

O. L. Haimson, A. Dame-Griff, E. Capello & Z. Richter (2019) ‘Tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies’, Feminist Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505

T. Raun (2016) Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube. London: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/Out-Online-Trans-Self-Representation-and-Community-Building-on-YouTube/Raun/p/book/9780367596620

Son Vivienne (2017) ‘“I Will Not Hate Myself because You Cannot Accept Me”: Problematizing Empowerment and Gender-Diverse Selfies’, Popular Communication, 15(2): 126–140 https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269906

M.Y. Chen (2010) ‘Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet’, Australian Feminist Studies, 25(64): 199-208 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164641003762503

J.N. Chen (2019) Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement. Durham: Duke University Press https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2636/Trans-ExploitsTrans-of-Color-Cultures-and

R. A. Pearce (2020) ‘A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy’, Sociology, 54(4): 806-824 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520904918

Engagement with the “wrong body” model/trans medicalisation (rebuttal to the claim that trans theory necessarily reinforces a strict or medical model of gender)

T. M. Bettcher (2014) ‘Trapped in the wrong theory: Rethinking trans oppression and resistance’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(2): 383–406 https://doi.org/10.1086/673088

N. Sullivan (2008) ‘The Role of Medicine in the (Trans)Formation of “Wrong” Bodies’, Body & Society, 14(1): 105-116 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X07087533

J.R. Latham (2019) ‘Axiomatic: Constituting “transsexuality” and trans sexualities in medicine’, Sexualities, 22 (1-2), 13-30 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717740258

J.R. Latham (2017) ‘Making and Treating Trans Problems: The Ontological Politics of Clinical Practices’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 18(1): 40-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2016.1238682

S. Vogler (2019) ‘Determining Transgender: Adjudicating Gender Identity in U.S. Asylum Law’, Gender & Society, 33(3): 439-462 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243219834043

A.P. Hilário (2020) ‘Rethinking trans identities within the medical and psychological community: a path towards the depathologization and self-definition of gender identification in Portugal?’, Journal of Gender Studies, 29(3): 245-256, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2018.1544066

Non-binary and genderqueer subjectivities specifically (rebuttal to the erasure of non-binary identities – there is a growing field of empirical and theoretical work that looks at the complexities of non-binary and genderqueer identities and experiences)

H. Darwin (2020) ‘Challenging the Cisgender/Transgender Binary: Nonbinary People and the Transgender Label’, Gender & Society, 34(3):357-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243220912256

H. Barbee & D. Schrock (2019) ‘Un/gendering Social Selves: How Nonbinary People Navigate and Experience a Binarily Gendered World’, Sociological Forum, 34(3): 572-593 https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12517

S. Monro (2019) ‘Non-binary and genderqueer: An overview of the field’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 20(2-3): 126-131 https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1538841

C. Richards, W. P. Bouman, L. Seal, M-J. Barker, T.O. Nieder, G. T’Sjoen (2016) ‘Non-binary or genderqueer genders’, International Review of Psychology, 28(1): 95-102 https://doi.org/10.3109/09540261.2015.1106446

S.Bower-Brown, S. Zadeh & V.Jadva (2021) ‘Binary-trans, non-binary and gender-questioning adolescents’ experiences in UK schools’, Journal of LGBT Youth, 1-19 https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2021.1873215

D. Cosgrove (2021) ‘“I am allowed to be myself”: A photovoice exploration of non-binary identity development and meaning-making’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 33(1): 78-102 https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2020.1850385

A. Vijlbrief, S. Saharso & H. Ghorashi (2020) ‘Transcending the gender binary: Gender non-binary young adults in Amsterdam’, Journal of LGBT Youth, 17(1): 89-106 https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2019.1660295

L. Nicholas (2019) ‘Queer ethics and fostering positive mindsets toward non-binary gender, genderqueer, and gender ambiguity’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 20(2-3): 169-180 https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1505576

Emily in Paris: Sexless in the City

Posted on October 25, 2020 by binarythis

This post contains minor spoilers for the Netflix series Emily in Paris – tune out now if you haven’t already inhaled the show in one sitting and don’t want to know how long it takes Emily to get to Paris etc.

Emily in Paris doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to getting its protagonist to said city. Much like a porno film of old, it begins with an extremely brief and tenuous set up including some interactions with a generic boyfriend character (who is quickly cut). Literally only four minutes of exposition later, Emily is rolling down the Champs-Élysées.

It must be said, straight up, that I would best describe this show as utter garbage. After I swiftly watched the whole series, my partner (who deftly avoided it despite being in the same locked-down house) asked me about the narrative arc of the season. The best I could muster was, “Emily succeeded in her job and slept with the guy she has a crush on”. Emily wears some truly terrible outfits, most people hate her, but a lot of men are attracted to her. She never stops working. Paris is beautiful. Not a lot happens.

Some of my favourite cringeworthy lines from the show include:

[commenting on a perfume] “It smells like poetry”
[after meeting a brand CEO] “I actually have a Masters in Marketing”
[after meeting a semiotics professor] “Semiotics? The study of symbols. I have a Master of Communication” [*shrugs*]
[on the idea of mistresses] “I’m not somebody that can share a crepe. I want the whole crepe”
[on eating an actual crepe] “It’s funny how every culture has its pancake”

Emily is nominally in Paris to work at a marketing firm and provide “the American point of view”. That is indeed what we get from Emily. She is represented as the hard-working, relentlessly optimistic, severely earnest, unapologetically garish American. But most fascinating (to me), is that Emily is depicted as a strait-laced millennial feminist clashing with her lewd, openly sexual and decidedly “not feminist” French counterparts.

Distancing herself from her sexually liberal postfeminist mom, Sex and the City (SATC), Emily in Paris‘ rebellion entails: a) being au fait with feminism; and b) keeping a lid on sex (or at least keeping the covers pulled up). The creator of Emily in Paris Darren Star was also behind SATC, so there is much we can learn about the mediation of changing mainstream feminist ideas in comparing the two shows.

Emily in between her two much more interesting friends Mindy and Camille

During the 2000s SATC became the key text for feminist critique of “postfeminism” – a term used to refer to the representation of women as capitalising on feminist gains of the past while simultaneously disavowing feminism. For example, as feminist scholar Angela McRobbie remarked of shows like SATC in 2008: “These new young women are confident enough to declare their anxieties about possible failure in regard to finding a husband, they avoid any aggressive or overtly traditional men, and they brazenly enjoy their sexuality, without fear of the sexual double standard”

But while SATC was all about fucking and not mentioning the shadow of feminism, Emily in Paris is all about being a career woman who seems concerned about feminism but is extremely prudish about sex. Emily is a millennial who has come of age in a world where every white woman completed a Masters in Communication and Marketing after watching Mad Men and then became a feminist after Trump beat Hillary.

There is, however, little substance to raising the spectre of feminism rather than disavowing it. As we see in Episode 3 “Sexy or Sexist” Emily’s views on the objectification of women are only relevant insofar as they have an impact on the brand she’s working for. In this episode we see Emily watching a perfume ad being filmed. It features a naked woman strolling across a bridge being admired/ogled by men, wearing “only perfume”. Emily appears shocked after watching the ad. When asked by the brand CEO what she thinks, she suggests that the ad might be sexist, depicting the naked woman as at the mercy of the male gaze. Importantly her French boss Sylvie (set up as a wickedly unfriendly character) not only tells Emily to lighten up, she says that even though she is a woman she herself is not a feminist. Here Sylvie acts as the outdated postfeminist Other to Emily’s American feminist inclinations. When the CEO asks why the male gaze is a problem, Emily responds:

“I’m worried it won’t translate in the States. In today’s climate it could come off as politically incorrect… we just need to be sensitive to the way women are thinking now. I wanna protect your brand!”

Emily’s career mode and life mode are indistinguishable

Emily suggests sharing the ad on social media and asking women to answer the question “sexy or sexist?” to “get a conversation going and…make it part of your campaign”. In other words, taking a political position is redundant. People might think the ad is sexy or sexist, but all that matters is that they end up buying the product. The show is pulling the same move. What do feminists think about sex now? *Shrugs*

Emily represents what I have termed elsewhere “entrepreneurial feminist femininity“. This is a specifically gendered mode that means identifying with feminism, adhering to and reinforcing a rigid gender binary, and most importantly focusing on achieving individual success within the given system of gender relations rather than challenging the system. This is similar to what others have termed “lean-in feminism” or “neoliberal feminism“.

Emily’s relentless optimism always pays off

Emily is distinctly entrepreneurial in spirit. All failures are opportunities for Emily. Nothing can get her down. As Silvio Lorusso argues in his excellent book “Entreprecariat“, precarious employment mixed with entrepreneurial ideology is now the dominant mode of contemporary work, where there is no work-life balance because life is work (and we love it!). Emily in Paris embodies this on every level, with endless references to her American mode of overwork, where no boundaries exist between Emily’s personal life, her influencer life on social media, or her career as a marketing expert. Emily’s feminism is only relevant insofar as it can help her more effectively sell things.

While the show is all about Emily The Career Woman, the sexually explicit aspects of SATC era take a back seat. Despite men seemingly throwing themselves at Emily, the most risqué the show gets is Emily accidentally sleeping with a seventeen year old who gives her a hickey. It’s not even close to the explicitness of Samantha’s endless sex-marathons, Charlotte’s husband-wanking issues, Carrie’s golden-shower dilemma, or Miranda’s boyfriend fingering dramas of SATC days past. And unlike her “heteroflexible” foremothers, don’t even mention the possibility of girl-on-girl action to Emily. Emily insists – over and over – that is something that would never even cross her mind (she “likes to please men”).

My guess is that with future seasons of Emily in Paris (and yes I suspect there will be many many more) part of the grand-er arc will be that Emily becomes more enculturated into the “French ways” meaning slightly less gaudy style and in turn more (under the covers) sex. We’ll get to see just how American feminism today at once distances itself from its “postfeminist” predecessors while making similar – yet decidedly less adventurous – moves.

Of course, I’ll keep watching.

BINARYTHIS

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GENDER BUT WERE TOO AFRAID TO ASK