So I’m reading and idly thinking about the difference between a “scene” and a community.
A scene is a place to be seen. It is by the very choice of that word, a setting, something visual, spatial, artificial. The scene is the clothes you wear to the punk rock show–the community is the group you go home with afterward, or stumble to the diner to talk it all over afterward.
The scene can be a place for community to grow, but it can also kill community by creating the illusion that this is all there is. If all it appears to be is clothes and club nights, then you reject everything when you take off those clothes and stop going to the club nights.
If it means more than clothes–if it means music, art, politics, blood, bone and love–most of all love–then no matter what you wear or how old you get, your community will not fail you.
This is why modern hipsterism feels so damn empty. It is nothing but visual, spatial. You can’t be a hipster on the telephone. You can be on the internet, but only in pictures snapped at the cool parties, with the cool kids, in the cool clothes. You cannot be a hipster alone in the forest.
To write, create, you must go beyond hip. You must go beyond the scene. My writing prof is always nagging us to write a story, not a scene, to find something deeper, something meaningful, something that changes you.
This is why I have more love even for a book like Twilight, cheesy, occasionally inept and often laugh-inducing when it’s not meant to be, because it has not the slightest bit of irony. And this is why it has a rabid fan base (more later). Because to write, to create, you have to put yourself out there to risk being mocked.
And this is why books like that create communities, friendships, bonds, even though many people cheerily admit that they know it’s terrible.
The blogosphere is my new punk rock scene, but more than that, it’s my new community. As I grow older and hide my tattoos under sweaters and skirts and high heels. It creates communities because we cannot be seen. It is not temporal–once you put something on the Internet it is there for good, and you lose control of it–and it is not spatial, because where is the Internet?
While we may blog our bodies, perhaps, we blog those inner pieces that are not so easy to see or to change. Perhaps I would have been more accurate to say that we blog the experiences our bodies have had, have caused for us or been through. After all, would blogging as a Jewish woman be the same for me in Israel as it is in Philadelphia? Was I the same in Boston as I was in South Carolina? It is not just our bodies but the social construction of and around our bodies that really shapes who we are.
And we find community within those lines and across them. Because we put ourselves out there, not to be seen, but to be understood.
Not like this is the first time I’ve posted about this.
But see, this is the thing. Natalia wrote in response to Twisty’s comment that women should repudiate femininity if they can, because they will never have equality unless they are de-otherized.
Because butch women are apparently never raped or treated with sexist scorn. Because I’ve never had my ass grabbed when I was wearing pants or not wearing makeup. I mean, should we all transition in order to get rid of Class Woman? Well, wait, clearly that’s not allowed either.
I have breasts. I have curvy hips and an ass that next to no one is going to confuse for male. Should I lose a bunch of weight in order to make my body as boyish as possible, in order to repudiate femininity and more easily what, pass as a man?
I know I’ll be accused of oversimplifying, so I’ll pull out my own Advanced Blamer card here and quote Susan Bordo, talking about anorexia.
“On the other hand, even as young women today continue to be taught traditionally ‘feminine’ virtues, to the degree that the professional arena is open to them they must also learn to embody the ‘masculine’ language and values of that arena–self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery, and so on. Female bodies now speak symbolically of this necessity in their slender spare shape…Our bodies, too, as we trudge to the gym every day and fiercely resist both our hungers and our desire to sooth ourselves, are becoming more and more practiced at the ‘male’ virtues of control and self-mastery. The anorectic pursues these virtues with single-minded, unswerving dedication…
Explored as a possibility for the self, the “androgynous” ideal ultimately exposes its internal contradiction and becomes a war that tears the subject in two–a war explicitly thematized, by many anorectics, as a battle between the male and female sides of the self…
Protesting the stifling of the female voice through one’s own voicelessness–that is, employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female world–will always involve ambiguities of this sort…
As her body begins to lose its traditional feminine curves, its breasts and hips and rounded stomach, begins to feel and look more like a spare, lanky male body, she begins to feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt, “invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette,” as one student described it in her journal…
Through her anorexia, by contrast, she has unexpectedly discovered an entry into the privileged male world, a way to become what is valued in our culture, a way to become safe, to rise above it all–for her, they are the same thing…
To reshape one’s body into a male body is not to put on male power and privilege. To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body-practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities. And, of course, for the female to become male is only for her to locate herself on the other side of a disfiguring opposition…
For if femininity is, as Susan Brownmiller has said, at its core a ‘tradition of imposed limitations,’ then an unwillingness to limit oneself, even in the pursuit of femininity, breaks the rules.
The fact is that since “masculine” has been constructed as the neutral form for so long in ‘patriarchal’ society, for women to “repudiate femininity” doesn’t give them a neutral option. It mostly leads to the embrace of masculine bodily and clothing signifiers–thus, you catch women comparing how long it’s been since they’ve shaved, when body hair has been socially constructed for so long as a signifier of manhood. Women congratulate themselves for not dressing in a feminine manner, when the opposite is to adopt clothing gendered masculine.
So to “repudiate femininity” is not at all to do away with a gender binary. It is instead to adopt the other half of it–the masculine half.
I know there will be people who read this and say “That’s not what Twisty meant!” And of course a certain picture of femininity is valued in our culture above others. I have written and linked above about the changing creation of masculinity and femininity across (Western) culture, and how maintaining masculinity requires as much discipline as femininity.
But I am merely illustrating the fact that policing women’s bodies is NOT a feminist act. Policing women’s femininity is not helping women. It is still playing into the same double bind that Bordo is talking about when she writes of anorexia. Being able to dress and look how we want and still be respected as intelligent individuals capable of all the things men are capable of–THAT would be liberation.
Of all the options out there, all the drag I could wear, I choose several options. My closet is a costume chest full of personae for me to play with. Today I have to meet my students for the semester for the first time–the rest of the semester they will see me in the lab and so in jeans and clothes that I won’t be too sad if I get photo chemicals on. So today I put on a skirt and a nice shirt and I play teacher. Later I’m going out for drinks with a friend, so I will play pretty. Right now I’m writing, so I am lounging in my PJ’s. All these things are options for me. Options. Some are feminine, some are not. And I require people to treat me with respect and listen to me no matter how I am dressed. Which, to me, seems to be a better way of teaching them that feminine /= stupid or unworthy, rather than having to disavow anything sparkly or femme because it might make them take me less seriously or “other” me.
After all, isn’t repudiating femininity what patriarchal culture was all about?
Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” From Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, taken here from Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Columbia University Press, 1997
