Beauvoir and Irigaray: Philosophizing Postfeminism in Popular Culture

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2015-09-21 Beauvoir and Irigaray: Philosophizing Postfeminism in Popular Culture

Zimmerman, Tegan

Zimmerman, T. (2015). Beauvoir and Irigaray: Philosophizing Postfeminism in Popular Culture (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25100 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2473 master thesis

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Beauvoir and Irigaray:

Philosophizing Postfeminism in Popular Culture

Tegan Zimmerman

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2015

This thesis contributes to contemporary feminist philosophy by establishing a definition of postfeminism and analyzing two of its central tenets: equality and sexuality. The work’s central claim is that postfeminism is anti-feminist and functions as a façade that conceals the continuation of the structural subordination of women in our capitalist patriarchal society. This is evident in the latest instantiation of postfeminism, in which women sexually objectify men in the name of equality. The argument is that because women are objectified sexually in popular culture it is only fair men be as well. In refuting postfeminist claims, I draw from and expand upon Simone de

Beauvoir’s and Luce Irigaray’s feminist philosophical theories of equality and sexual difference, and I focus on specific examples from popular culture (sports, movies, music videos, magazines, commercials/advertising, online writing, social media, and so on).

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Dr. Lorraine Markotic for her encouragement, genuine enthusiasm, and constructive criticism. Our conversations were not only fun but also fundamental in helping me realize this project.

I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Ann Levey for pushing me to think critically about my work and Dr. Katrin Froese for reading my work and contributing to the project.

The insightful comments from my supervisor and the examination committee are greatly appreciated.

A special thank you to Denise Retzlaff, the Graduate Program Administrator in the Department of

Philosophy. You were so kind in helping me navigate the program, in answering my questions, and in helping me get the necessary paper work together.

Finally, thank you to my family and friends for believing in me and in the importance of feminist scholarship.

iii

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv INTRODUCTION: (POST) FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY ...... 1 CHAPTER ONE: POSTFEMINISM, A GENEALOGY ...... 15 CHAPTER TWO: EQUALITY ...... 229 Case Study 1 ...... 30 Case Study 2 ...... 36 Equality and Difference: Beauvoir and Irigaray ...... 39 CHAPTER THREE: SEXUALITY ...... 50 The Sexual Economy ...... 52 Mimesis and Femininity ...... 62 CONCLUSION: FEMINIST ALTERNATIVES ...... 73 References ...... 79

INTRODUCTION: (POST) FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

The term postfeminism invokes several competing and often contradictory interpretations

(backlash, anti, after, faux, postmodern, entertainment or fun feminism, and so on), and all have currency in Canadian and American popular culture. Postfeminism, however, can be loosely summarized as championing individual freedom and choice for women while eschewing feminism as a redundant social movement. Emerging in the early 1980s and ’90s, today postfeminism depoliticizes feminist goals and opposes collective feminist action in favour of an individualist, consumer driven, politics of sex, desire, empowerment, and sexuality. The postfeminist is decidedly modern, feminine, sexy, consuming, professionally competitive and ambitious, and supportive of neo-liberal standpoints: the condition is, however, paradoxically also one of ennui, distrust, and anxiety, perpetuated by the vicious cycle of consumerism, entertainment, and celebrity culture. By analyzing examples from Canadian and American popular culture (sports, movies, music videos, magazines, commercials/advertising, online writing, social media, and so on), this work argues that postfeminism is a façade that conceals the continuous structural subordination of women in our society.

My strategy of approaching postfeminism through the medium of popular culture is justified given the representations of women found in a wide range of media, which disclose an apparent carefree attitude and anti-feminist stance (primarily aimed at young women). These representations shape, and are likewise shaped by, the lived experiences of women. Much of the movement’s success, in popular culture and daily life, relies on keeping its polemic against feminism concealed or at least downplayed. As Angela McRobbie notes, “elements of popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism” (11). A deliberate movement away from feminism “is detectable across popular culture, a site where ‘power…is

1 remade at various junctures within everyday life, [constituting] our tenuous sense of common sense’” (Butler as qtd. in McRobbie 12). The status and influence of (anti)feminist ideas is best gauged by studying popular culture, and this is why it is necessary for philosophy to seriously engage with it. The philosophical implications of postfeminism, (as simultaneously disclosing and concealing an anti-feminist or faux-feminist position on equality and sexuality), and its insistence on woman’s individuality, freedom, and choice in our technologically driven consumerist society, however, are still in the early stages of theorization and need to be further analyzed.

This thesis constitutes research in contemporary feminist philosophy by laying the groundwork for a postfeminist position and by offering a critique of postfeminism via two of its most important tenets: equality and sexuality. I sustain this critique by re-reading the works of

Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray,1 whose feminist thinking on equality and sexual difference, though markedly different and rarely mentioned in postfeminist scholarship, is crucial to understanding and contesting today’s postfeminism. As Naomi Schor states: “the access of women to subjectivity is the central concern of the two major French feminist theoreticians of the twentieth century…both share a fundamental grounding conviction: under the social arrangement known as patriarchy the subject is exclusively male: masculinity and subjectivity are coextensive notions”

(62). In this introduction, I begin by articulating Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s philosophical engagements with feminism and equality; in Chapter One, I explicate postfeminism according to contemporary theorists (Adriaens; Brooks; Finney; Gamble; Helford; Lotz; Negra; McRobbie;

Tasker) in order to establish a working definition, and I explain in more detail why postfeminism is problematic as a philosophical and practical term for feminism. In Chapter Two, I return to the

1 All quotations from Beauvoir are from The Second Sex 1981 edition unless stated otherwise. Most, if not all, studies on Beauvoir and Irigaray make no mention of postfeminism.

2 concept of equality by first defining and later contesting popular postfeminist notions of equality, such as those which objectify men. The argument goes that because women are objectified sexually in popular culture, it is only fair that men be as well. Refuting such claims, I draw from and expand upon Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s notions of equality (further developing the ideas put forth in the

Introduction), and I focus on specific examples from Canadian and American popular culture such as cheerleading and podium girls and boys. In Chapter Three, I shift the discussion to sexuality and in particular the ideas of economy, mimesis, and femininity. Considering the role sexuality plays in postfeminism, particularly how the latest instantiation is gynosexist,2 is a necessary and useful endeavour in further challenging this movement. The conclusion of this work recapitulates my central argument: postfeminism operates under a false guise of freedom and empowerment for women, exemplified in representations of women in popular culture, that disguises or conceals its anti-feminist underpinnings and its inability to create meaningful political change for women.

A philosophy of postfeminism has yet to be articulated in part because feminist philosophy often centers on critiques of equality, and postfeminists claim to be beyond gender equity, “justice for women” (Alcoff and Kittay 9), and sexual equality.3 Beginning a discussion of postfeminism with an account of equality may seem counterintuitive, but it is necessary in order to grasp the concept. In this introduction, I discuss two competing feminist theories of equality from Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in order to situate postfeminism as an ironic anti-feminist/anti- equality philosophical stance. I suggest that postfeminism engages both Beauvoir’s definition of equality and Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference; therefore, my argument in this Introduction is

2 I discuss this term in Chapter Three. 3 I use the term gender to represent masculinity and femininity as social constructions which include norms and expectations assigned to women and men. Gender equality addresses the social role of being a woman and a man and that both are also social/cultural constructions subject to change over time. Sexual equality, on the other hand, asserts there is ontological sexual difference: males, females, or intersex – this is often referred to an essentialist position. 3 twofold: the first point is that postfeminism paradoxically operates on and draws from feminist philosophical notions of equality, despite the movement’s attempt to disown or disinherit this tradition and studying it in relation to equality is necessary. The second point builds on the first claim by articulating that postfeminism indeed falls under the rubric of feminist philosophies of equality because the newest manifestation of the stance argues for not only the overt sexualisation of women but also the overt sexualisation of men as this constitutes an equal objectification of the sexes.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “equality” as “[t]he state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities” (“equality”) and “feminism” as “[t]he advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes” (“feminism”). Postfeminism, implicitly suggests post-equality, and perhaps signals why so many feminist works on postfeminism do not address equality or include it as a key philosophical term in their indexes. But how can postfeminists, who claim to be beyond feminism and equality, ignore the concept which they wish to reject? As Jessica

K. Taft notes, if patriarchal western society, in the guise of postfeminism, can deceive men and women into believing there are no inequalities to be challenged – feminism becomes irrelevant.

Equally irrelevant is providing girls and women with “tools to understand and challenge situations where they experience sexism and other forms of oppression. Thus, girls are discouraged from seeing inequality and from engaging in challenges to such inequalities” (73). Postfeminism, particularly with its focus on individuality versus collective action (Anderson xiv) conceals the fact that change is needed and likewise eliminates or renders obsolete the means, feminism, by which women might challenge the status patriarchal quo.

In The Second Sex, writing in mid-twentieth century France, Beauvoir highlights the challenges women face in demanding equality, primarily in public affairs. She argues that the

4 representations of women found in various mediums – artistic, literary, historical, cultural, scientific, philosophical, etc. – are nothing more than myths created by patriarchy in order to sustain male privilege as a natural or eternal law. Concerned with studying women’s actual lived experiences and changing woman’s status and position, Beauvoir rejects an ontological category of woman. She does not, however, refute that there are two sexes, male and female. For instance, she writes: “The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein [togetherness]” (19). Being male or female, biology alone, however, is not enough to determine one’s social situation/position, to justify, or to explain social hierarchy. Furthermore, the categories of man/woman, masculine/feminine are false constructions and correlations to male/female which serve patriarchy – also a social construction

(22).4 In patriarchal societies, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being” (16). Patriarchal societies are ethically untenable for Beauvoir because woman is deemed inferior to man, despite the fact that first and foremost, woman is a “concrete human being [who] is always a singular, separate individual” (14).

To treat woman and femininity as ontological categories is oppressive; therefore, Beauvoir insists that women must resist such categorizations. The undoing of patriarchy will come about when women demand equality (19).

The problem Beauvoir identifies is that “what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of Other” (29). In terms of claiming

4 In “Sex and Gender” Butler reads Beauvoir as suggesting a commitment to a sex/gender construction, the logical corollary of which is “it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender. The presumption of a causal or mimetic relation between sex and gender is undermined…the consequence that ‘being’ female and ‘being’ a woman are two very different sorts of being” (1986, 35). But, Toril Moi rightfully argues “the trouble with the sex/gender construction is that it upholds the ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ view of the body as the ground on which gender is developed. To consider the body as a situation, on the other hand, is to refuse to break it down into an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ component” (What 73). 5 equality, she asks, “How is it that this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal sharing of the world between men and women?” (21). Sharing the world, at least in one respect, means women’s active participation in and insertion into public life and seemingly a rejection of

Otherness – which is experienced by women in the domestic sphere (i.e., childbearing, childrearing, housework). Economic disparity, gross underrepresentation in politics, and in general a lack of public opportunities for women must be combatted and challenged. Legal rights alone are not enough, as Beauvoir notes, because sexist social mores and attitudes continue to operate ubiquitously in society, and women often do not possess a means for resistance (21). As a woman, the consequences for not realizing oneself in the world, or public domain, however, have ethical and existential consequences. Living “passive, lost, ruined…the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his [her] transcendence and deprived of every value…one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence” (21). It is up to woman to demand/choose to be a master of her own will and to be able to enter into public life, if she wants equality.

Substituting gender pronouns in Beauvoir’s remarks about transcendence discloses the relation between man as Subject and woman as Other, but moreover, it sheds light on an important aspect to Beauvoir’s notion of equality. In the original French text, Beauvoir uses the French pronoun il: “il est alors la proie de volontés étrangères, coupé de sa transcendance, frustré de toute valeur” (Le Deuxième Sexe 21) to signify woman’s inability to transcend her situation (a situation inextricably connected to but not reduced to or solely explained by bodily sexual difference), and substituting il for elle makes this clearer; yet, if one leaves the original il then the suggestion is double fold: man’s transcendence frustrates woman’s transcendence. Transcendence correlates to self-realization, an active realizing of one’s will/self publicly: “every subject plays

6 his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties” (28). Bordering on the notion of disembodiment, for Beauvoir, woman is too often associated with or corresponded with her body, i.e., nature, motherhood, and domesticity. Essentializing woman confines her to the private realm and a role of immanence, e.g., she participates in repetitive anti-intellectual acts and labour like cooking and cleaning. The insinuation is that man’s transcendence necessarily depends on and functions upon woman’s non-transcendence. She must be static and remain the same, repetitive, in order for his transcendence to occur.

Furthermore, transcendence as an instantiation of authentic existence is intricately tied to freedom. Beauvoir writes: “The world is not a given world, foreign to man, one to which he has to force himself to yield from without. It is the world willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality” (Ethics of Ambiguity 17). The problem with woman’s status as Other is that she cannot contribute to shaping the world. Patriarchal society attempts to naturalize that which is in fact ideology. As the Other, she evades “liberty and become[s] a thing” (21).5 In western society the sexual hierarchy between men and women can be described as the following: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other”

(17). For Beauvoir, equality is exercising one’s transcendence and demonstrating an innate ability to reject and overcome woman’s social role of and status as Other (thing-hood, object-hood), which is perpetuated by patriarchal myths about Woman and the Feminine. This is achievable for

5 Though as Marion Iris Young in “Throwing Like a Girl” stresses “a woman under patriarchy often ends up living her body as a thing” (150), and postfeminism provides many good examples of this, i.e., Holly Madison, a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, has recently confessed in her autobiography Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny that in objectifying herself, she lost her self-worth and contemplated suicide. 7 women primarily by choosing to engage in the world of politics, economics, and social life

(Lundgren-Gothlin 170). But will this not in turn transform or alter man’s transcendence? If indeed transcendence functions on immanence, what will occur when woman no longer occupies this role? In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir suggests that ideal transcendence is reciprocal, and she maintains that the freedom of one’s self is necessarily contingent and ethically committed to the freedom of others (71; 73) – nevertheless, she emphasizes that woman, in order to demand her rightful equality to man, must choose transcendence, despite the fact that the model of transcendence is man’s realization through his engagement with the world.6

Drawing on the above ideas, in an ever-so-brief essay titled “Equal or Different?” (Egales ou différentes?), Irigaray attempts to move beyond Beauvoir’s definition of equality by focusing on sexual difference. Her essay is much more than a philosophical investigation into sexual difference and determining equality, however; it is a personal, epistolary lament, filled with disappointment, for the feminist work she and Simone de Beauvoir might have, could have, shared.

Irigaray regrets that because of her psychoanalytic training, best demonstrated in Speculum of the

Other Woman, Beauvoir distanced herself and felt little, if any, affinity with the author. Irigaray poses the title of her essay, an ironic logical fallacy representing presumed opposing positions

Beauvoir and she hold, to herself and to her readers.7 In fighting for equal socio/politico rights should women adopt the position a) which is that women are equal to men, and any rights or positions, for instance firefighter or Prime Minister, can sufficiently be performed by either sex?

6 Butler goes so far as to argue that Beauvoir recognizes “the masculine project of disembodiment is self-deluding and, finally, unsatisfactory” (1986, 43). Beauvoir insists that man is as much of his body as woman, though he “superbly ignores the fact” (15). 7 Margaret Whitford notes that Irigaray published this essay on April 19, 1986, the day Simone de Beauvoir died (23), again suggesting continuity with Beauvoir’s life and work, not a disruption. Echoing my thinking here that Beauvoir’s work is not diametrically opposed to Irigaray’s and vice versa, Zakin writes: It is not that she [Beauvoir] presents us with a dialectical synthesis or with the compromise of a ‘third way,’ but rather that her work engenders a transformation of concepts, one that reconceives the relation between equality and difference by moving to a point beyond or prior to their opposition as it is rendered in contemporary feminist discourse” (106). 8

This stance, which Irigaray aligns with Beauvoir, seeks to erase sexual difference in favour of gender neutrality, but contradicts itself by upholding and valuing masculinist activities as the norm.

For instance, Alison M. Jaggar cites a “purportedly sex-blind ordinance forbidding firefighters to breast-feed between calls, an ordinance that of course applied ‘equally’ to male and female firefighters” (“Sexual Difference and Sexual Equality” 19). Alison Stone similarly stresses that

“the pursuit of women’s equal participation in traditionally male activities…uncritically presupposes the positive value of these traditional activities…so that women can participate in them only by tacitly adopting a male self-identification” (“The Sex of Nature: A Reinterpretation of Irigaray’s Metaphysics and Political Thought” 73). Though Beauvoir’s position often upholds male life as an ideal and places importance on masculine endeavours, she, nevertheless, affirms sexual difference as ideological not ontological.8 Emily Zakin writes, “[In Beauvoir’s work], the embodied subject is finite, limited, and sexed” (113),9 but given that attitudes and gender norms can and do change (suggesting sexism is a social construct), Beauvoir’s philosophy does not treat being female or a woman as lesser than maleness or being a man: to do so would fundamentally risk undermining her entire existentialist project, which consists of questioning why woman is considered the second sex and how rejecting the term as an egregious, misogynistic label can and will bring women equality.

8 One must also assume that Beauvoir would favour paid maternity leave for women but likewise paid paternity leave for men. 9 Butler believes that “Simone de Beauvoir does not suggest the possibility of other genders besides ‘man’ and ‘woman’, yet her insistence that these are historical constructs which must in every case be appropriated by individuals suggests that a binary gender system has no ontological necessity” (1986, 47-48). Butler, updating her earlier article, writes: “Indeed, it becomes unclear when one takes Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation to its unstated consequences, whether gender need be in any way linked with sex, or whether this conventional linkage is itself culturally bound. If gender is a way of ‘existing’ one’s body, and one’s body is a ‘situation,’ a field of cultural possibilities both received and reinterpreted, then gender seems to be a thoroughly cultural affair” (1998, 38-39). Toril Moi, on the other hand, claims “for Beauvoir, the possession of the usual biological and anatomical sexual characteristics is what makes a woman a woman. But given that she [Beauvoir] firmly demonstrates that this has no necessary social and political consequences, this is a kind of essentialism that has no negative consequences whatsoever for feminist politics. The only kind of essentialism that feminists need to reject is biological determinism” (What is A Woman? 37). 9

Position b), associated with feminist thinkers like Irigaray, argues that women and men are ontologically sexually different and equality is attained when women are not defined in relation to and against men: Irigaray rejects the binary of man and not-man (woman): recognizing sexual difference also requires a set of specific sexuate rights, for instance women’s rights over their own bodies when it comes to contraception, abortion, surrogacy, in-vitro fertilization, etc.10 Irigaray writes that “demanding equality, as women, seems to me to be an erroneous expression of a real issue. Demanding to be equal presupposes a term of comparison. Equal to what? What do women want to be equal to? Men? A wage? A public position? Equal to what? Why not to themselves?”

(Irigary Reader 35). Irigaray’s questions, however, clearly resonate with the following statement from Beauvoir who is often, I think mistakenly, charged with upholding the masculine-neuter as that to which women must strive and emulate. In her chapter “The Lesbian,” Beauvoir writes, “The truth is that man today represents the positive and neutral – that is to say, the male and the human being – whereas woman is only the negative, the female. Whenever she behaves as a human being, she is declared to be identifying herself with the male” (428). Establishing a relation between humans, not premised on notions of sexual difference (male/female, masculine/feminine, man/woman), is already part of Beauvoir’s existentialist project.

It is true for both philosophers, however, that Western society assumes masculinity or men to be the norm or dominant referent whereby femininity and women are disparaged and oppressed/suppressed.11 A process of assimilation occurs when women, despite sexual difference, strive to be men, and this “condemns them to being second-best approximations to men” (Stone,

“The Sex of Nature” 73). Irigaray, therefore, argues for an equality premised on sexual difference.

10 Meanwhile, other positions like Butler’s expand upon both positions by rejecting gender difference and sexual difference as ontological – this standpoint presupposes that gender is a social construction but so too is sex. 11 Young in “Throwing Like A Girl” also reads Beauvoir as suggesting women must revolt against femininity as it is femininity which keeps them oppressed. 10

Celebrating sexual difference as such, it is no surprise Irigaray has been charged with essentializing women and confining women (in a similar manner to patriarchal societies and cultures) despite their differences to their sex.12 Yet, she is also careful to emphasize that despite sexual difference, women’s social roles are artificial constructs: motherhood for instance is a choice and a social function not a biological necessity – Beauvoir’s philosophy likewise views motherhood as a social function but one that often hinders woman’s entrance into social life, impeding transcendent projects and activities and essentializing her as material for patriarchal society.

Central to Irigaray’s project of equality is that women reclaim an identity beyond patriarchy, hence her skepticism over Beauvoir’s stance. As Stone writes of Irigaray’s notion of sexuate rights: “any attempt to go beyond sexual difference without first constructing and valorising a sui generis female identity will inadvertently reproduce patriarchal conceptions of sexual difference, which, precisely, deny any such female identity” (Luce Irigaray and the

Philosophy of Sexual Difference 191). Irigaray suggests that the current state of inequality, based on sexual difference, can only be “resolved through sexual difference” (Irigaray 32). A suppression or denial of sexual difference erases, in the same manner as patriarchy, the existence and importance of women: “Trying to suppress sexual difference is to invite a genocide more radical than any destruction that has ever existed in History” (Irigaray 32). While Irigaray argues for sexuate rights and duties for both “genres” (32), her position, one that operates on the logic of sameness or difference, seemingly excludes other sex-specific genres such as transgender, transsexual, or intersex people.13 The perspective does not allow for sexuate identities outside of

12 This argument is put forward by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in her work on Black women and domestic violence. Crenshaw, adopting an intersectional framework, argues that the identity markers, race and gender, fail to take into consideration the complexity of Black women’s and other marginalized women’s lives. Mieke Verloo goes so far as to say when identity categories are framed categorically as either same or different, rather than interrogating inequality, binary pairs such as male/female, black/white reproduce inequality (898). 13 Danielle Poe, contra Ann Murphy, argues Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference can be inclusive of other sexualities; thus she reads the “cultivation of sexual difference as inclusive of transsexual and transgender experience” (116). 11 man and woman because Irigaray’s project is to centralize women as “equal [to] (but necessarily different)” (Irigaray 31) from men.

The refusal to acknowledge trans-people is a major limitation to Irigaray’s argument because in doing so, she suppresses sex minorities which struggle to find acceptance, a place, and equality in patriarchal culture. As Ann Murphy notes “the heterosexist and heteronormative tenor of Irigaray’s project becomes worrisome” (89); mindful of this potential shortcoming in Irigaray’s philosophy, I recognize different sexualities, different sexes genres when discussing equality and sexuality in the following chapters.14 Therefore, if Irigaray’s criticism of Beauvoir is that she does not rupture or challenge the binary of sexual difference which privileges men, then the Beauvoirian criticism of Irigaray is that sexual difference rather than freeing women from the confines of their so-called sex, re-stabilizes and imprisons women and men, and all peoples, as an either one or the other sexual identity or sexe genre.

In “Equality,” Jaggar characterizes this impasse in feminism as

the unfortunate consequences that result from consistent politics of treating men and

women either identically or differently. When women are treated identically to men…we

are penalized for our difference because we are measured against a male norm. When we

are treated differently from men…even the provision of so-called special benefits, rights,

or protections may often have damaging consequences insofar as it reifies currently

14 Moi argues that “hermaphroditism, transvestism, transsexuality, and so on show up the fuzziness at the edges of sexual difference, but concepts ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or the opposition between them are not thereby threatened by disintegration…[these sexualities] prove that not all human beings can easily be categorized as either as male or female, [and] that there will always be ambiguous, unclear, or borderline cases…If gays, lesbians, transvestites, transsexualism and intersexed people suffer discrimination in contemporary society, this is the fault of our social norms and ideologies concerning human sex and sexuality, not of the assumption that biologically speaking, there are only two sexes” (What 39-40). For further discussion of thinking about sexual difference in relation to transgender and transsexual people see Thinking with Irigaray edited by Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom, and Serene J. Khader, Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, and Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. 12

perceived sex differences, confirms stereotypes, obliterates differences between women,

and reinforces the status quo. (14)

Jaggar suggests flexibility, meaning feminists can and should adopt either approach, depending on the context, i.e., demanding equal pay as a female firefighter and the right to breastfeed between shifts is not an incompatible stance to hold (even if that particular female firefighter does not have children or does have children but chooses not to breastfeed – this thought should be developed even further to include cis male, trans, or intersex firefighters who can breastfeed by breast or bottle). Though Jaggar admits living with contradictions is hardly comfortable (“Sex Difference”

27), it may be necessary in order to dismantle dominating structures which privilege the lives of men; furthermore, it is in feminists’ best interests to reject the binary, put in place and maintained by the patriarchal philosophical tradition, that places these views at odds with one another. A collaborative perspective is more productive for feminism. Feminists will not be forced to choose between position a) or b), but will seek a flexible collaboration which best achieves equality for a specific socio-political time and place.

To conclude, while one can argue “Beauvoir overstates how much freedom of choice we have while Irigaray overstates how much power culture has over us” (Stone Introduction 177), both Beauvoir and Irigaray insist on women’s equality and the dissolution of the sex hierarchy.

For Beauvoir this means Woman no longer occupying the position of Other, and for Irigaray it means rejecting masculinity and maleness as the norm or dominant referent15 to which femininity and femaleness are compared, othered, and determined. Schor articulates this difference in terms of women achieving subjectivity. In terms of women gaining recognition as Subjects, Beauvoir

15 Interestingly, Beauvoir’s remarks are not always consistent in this regard as mentioned previously in her chapter “The Lesbian.” Other thoughts on biology, in particular, emphasize this claim as well; she writes that the ovaries were once called “feminine testicles” (40) and questions why the female should be considered a mere version of or a lesser male. 13 insists on women’s transcendent activity, while Irigaray contends that women must employ language as a speaking subject; thus, the homo faber that serves as Beauvoir’s model gives way to the homo parlans” (64). Irigaray proposes her notion of mimicry, which is the focus of Chapter

Three, as the means to undermine or parody masculine culture whereas Beauvoir suggests adopting traditionally “masculine” attributes, and if women can do so, it suggests that masculinity is not reserved solely for men nor does it correlate in any essential way to any sex. In our postfeminist milieu, a time characterized by hyper-femininity, overt sexuality, individualism, consumerism,

ITC’s, and capitalism, this impasse in equality plays itself out, most visibly on the bodies of women in popular culture. The assumption is that the egalitarian feminism which Beauvoir favours has mostly been achieved and that the need for Irigaray’s anti-patriarchal, distinct female identity/culture is likewise unnecessary. The following chapters study a range of representations of women as evidence of postfeminism in popular culture. The chapters also provide cases which both resist and embrace (even if unwittingly) Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s feminist notions of equality and sexuality, and in doing so, lay the groundwork for theorizing and criticizing postfeminism within the discipline of philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE: POSTFEMINISM, A GENEALOGY

Postfeminism emerged most recently in the early 1980s (Finney 123; Gamble 44; Genz 18;

Walters 118) and is a difficult term to define.16 In this chapter, I trace the term from the 1980s to

2015 in order to elucidate it as a distinct philosophy: I identify dominant ideologies and recent developments in the movement as well as both deep-rooted and new challenges feminists are facing. Often read as a backlash against feminism (Faludi 15; Walters 117), or an “othering” of feminism (Tasker and Negra 4), the word “post” also signals a moving beyond feminism

(McRobbie 28). This begs the question that one already and in advance knows what feminism is; as Rebecca West in 1913 poetically wrote in The Clarion “I myself have never been able to find out exactly what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” In order for postfeminism to be intelligible in either of these two senses, anti-feminism or après-feminism, a stable and static definition of feminism must be presupposed. West’s remark about being “a doormat or a prostitute,” furthermore, underscores that equality and sexuality are two of feminism’s central tenets, and it is these aspects in particular which postfeminism seeks to trouble or undo.17

Yet, a notion of postfeminism must also mean more than the two senses named above: the inherent nature of the “post” necessarily indicates an ending or a completion (Jones, “Post-

Feminism” 8): the project called feminism has been completed, and society is ready to move on into the future without it. This completion can be interpreted as saying feminism has achieved its

16 Lynne Alice (7) and Susan Faludi (70) claim the earliest notion of postfeminism occurred after women’s suffrage in the 1920s. Sophia Phoca and Rebecca Wright suggest postfeminism originates in Paris, 1968: it “has developed since the late 1960s from the deconstruction of patriarchal discourses.” (3). I reject this early beginning and prefer Finney’s placing of the 1980s because I consider the French feminism which Phoca and Wright discuss as supporting the women’s movement; and their rejection of the term “feminist” does not ipso facto make them postfeminists. 17 I discuss the concept of feminist equality in more detail in the next chapter and sexuality in the following one. As Wright and Phoca note postfeminism “signifies a shift in feminist theory” away from “a desire for gender equality” (3) and towards identity. 15 social-political goals: politically, men and women are equal. For postfeminists the term is somewhat celebratory because if women have achieved gender equality then there is no more need for feminists to fight for this equality. Lamenting the loss of feminism or its lack of necessity/utility in society is misguided. Consequently, the advent of new waves such as the third and fourth waves or movements like transnational feminism are rendered meaningless or futile endeavours without any real basis or foundation (Kinser 1).18

But of course, one need not accept a unified definition of feminism or assume feminism cannot be self-reflexive, as postfeminism suggests, nor on the other hand do postfeminists have to be necessarily anti feminisms in the plural or anti-postfeminisms in the plural. Like an indefinite pronoun, feminism in the singular may indeed encompass feminism in the plural. In articulating what postfeminism is, I make two claims: one that postfeminism is an oxymoronic term because society is not without the need of feminisms: gender equality has not been achieved, and the projects of feminism have not been fully realized (in part because women’s goals for social change inevitably change over and with time); two, postfeminism in rejecting or eschewing feminism as no longer necessary, (whether from a jubilant or a hostile standpoint), necessarily draws on several key feminist ideas like equality, and, therefore, should be read as ironic because it can be conceptualized as a feminist movement in and of itself.

Ann Brooks suggests it is problematic to read the “post” in postfeminism as overcoming or replacing feminism. She argues that just as “postcolonialism can be seen as marking ‘a critical engagement with colonialism’ …postfeminism can be understood as critically engaging with patriarchy” (1). This is a false comparison, however. If indeed in the former, colonialism is the

18 Andi Zeisler writes that “to say that postfeminism co-opted third wave feminism isn’t quite accurate, but it certainly played a part in hijacking the dialogue that self-identified third wave feminists wanted to have with the culture at large” (116). 16 referent with which the post engages, then feminism, not patriarchy, should be that with which the post engages. Postfeminism, represented in popular culture, often references feminism if only to denigrate it and dismiss it.19 For instance, in playful television shows like Portlandia this confrontation over feminism comes to a head when a young woman comes into the Women and

Women First Bookstore, owned and operated by two second wave feminists, Candace and Toni

(played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein).

Candace and Toni, after asking where her pants are (she is wearing short shorts), suggest the young woman sign up for a class called Abbey Dee’s Queer Question offered at the store, but the woman declines, saying she has a pole-dancing class that day. Enraged by this news, Candace and Toni berate the woman, and after the woman steals a book she needs for her Women’s Studies class and rushes out of the store, Candace and Toni hug lamenting “we lost another one” (“A Song for Portland”). The supposition is that feminists are out of touch with young women’s lives and their values. In order for postfeminism to dominate popular culture (the viewer has a good laugh at the fuddy duddy feminists) it must position itself in relation to and against feminism. The hyperbolized feminists in the show are shown to be absurd in contrast to the sensible and liberated young woman. Postfeminism does not necessarily critically engage with patriarchy (in fact, as I suggest, in many ways it upholds patriarchal values) but it does necessarily critically engage with feminism. A more accurate characterization is that postfeminism critically engages with feminism

– which is an idea and movement dedicated to combatting and contesting patriarchy and inequality.

19 Stephanie Harzewski, referencing writers like Melissa Bank, claims chick lit is “the most culturally visible form of postfeminist fiction” (8) primarily because of “the importance accorded to consumption, particularly the ability to select the correct commodities to attain a lifestyle inspired by celebrity culture, such as luxury weddings, the mainstreaming of the nanny figure, and the routinization of cosmetic surgery and breast implants” (10). Likewise she explains the popularity of this fiction aligning with postmodern elements in a late capitalist society such as commercializing intimacy. 17

Both Suzanna Danuta Walters and Brooks suggest that as of the late 1990s two versions of postfeminism existed, a popular one (hostile to feminism for creating an impossible work/family dichotomy and harkening a return to traditional womanly ways and motherhood (Walters 122))20 and an academic one informed by feminism21 (and intersecting with postmodern, poststructural, and post-colonial theory)22: “It is fundamentally about, not a depoliticisation of feminism, but a political shift in feminism’s conceptual and theoretical agenda…in the process postfeminism facilitates a broad-based, pluralistic conception of the application of feminism, and addresses the demands of marginalized, diasporic and colonized cultures for a non-hegemonic feminism capable of giving voice to local, indigenous and postcolonial feminisms” (Brooks 4). Not insignificantly, both of Brooks’ strands depend on a late capitalist, postmodern culture. While Brooks’ description of academic postfeminism, which to reiterate challenges the epistemological foundations of second wave feminism (i.e., universalizing ideas of patriarchy, women, oppression), focuses on difference and discourse, decolonizes feminism, and collapses consensus, is productive for undermining feminism as a master narrative, one must ask how can it repoliticize as feminism? As Sarah

Gamble notes, Brooks’ theoretical position “runs the risk of removing it from the ‘real’ world of political agency and social activism” (50). Walters, likewise, believes the versions “have serious points of overlap that equally, albeit with different intentions, contribute to the dissolution of feminism as theory and practice” (117). How can postfeminism argue for social change from the position of difference? How has postfeminism changed in the twenty-first century? Why does it

20 Walters, in her study of films from the 1980s and early 1990s like Pretty Woman, Fatal Attraction, and Presumed Innocent, suggests popular culture encourages that “the mother’s fecundity must be channeled toward her family not toward the external world” (132). The working woman is “bad” because she is childless, sexual, and violent or if she is a mother, she negligibly neglects her children and family by working. 21 Genz rejects this bifurcation because it “runs the risk of recreating an artificial dichotomy between the academic ivory tower and popular culture” (22). In some ways Genz’s point makes sense because students and academics, like everyone else, contribute to and comprise popular culture, and similarly popular culture is highly influential in the academy. 22 Post-colonial theory is particularly relevant for feminist theory given its political raison d’être and modus operandi. 18 remain a dominant, hegemonic ideology in popular culture? These are but a few of the questions this work raises in explicating the usage and political potential, or lack thereof, of postfeminism.

A return to solidarity or the transnational turn is one reason postfeminism in its academic sense has been criticized.23 Françoise Lionnet argues that “transnational feminism attaches much value to the questions of solidarity, for such an ethics implies that we remain respectful of differences while arguing for universal human rights in a multipolar world” (106). Chandra

Talpade Mohanty, cognizant of western feminism’s imperializing tendencies, also emphasizes why transnational feminism is integral to building new connections. She believes “because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining, the challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately. [The] concern is for women of different communities and identities to build coalitions and solidarities across borders” (266). A transnational project will, amongst other criteria, be “a way of thinking about women in similar contexts across the world, in different geographical spaces, rather than as all women across the world” (Alexander and Mohanty 24). Mindful of feminism’s engagement with postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial frameworks, transnational feminist and global feminist movements are political movements of protest committed to equality.

Another reason why academic postfeminism fails to resonate with feminists is that it is a pre-emptive irony which as “a defining characteristic of postfeminism culture evidently chimes with the parodic play associated with postmodern aesthetics” (McRobbie as qtd. in Tasker and

Negra 6).24 Similarly, Rey Chow articulates a discomfort with postfeminist parody and irony:

“Even though feminists partake in the postmodernist ontological project of dismantling claims of

23 Other movements such as cyberfeminism, intersectional feminism, third, and fourth wave feminism as well as masculinity studies need to be considered in relation to and influencing/influenced by postfeminism. 24 For the political potential of postmodern feminism, see Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994). 19 cultural authority that are housed in specific representations, feminism’s rootedness in overt political struggles against the subordination of women makes it very difficult to accept” (103). The postfeminist stance is a luxury, says Gamble paraphrasing Germaine Greer, and can be only adequately understood in economic terms and as symptomatic of privileged, affluent Western cultures whose cultivation of the self (principally the physical) is a luxury (Gamble 51).

This focus, dually noted by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, on consumption, commodification, leisure, youth,25 surgical procedures, makeovers, commercial beautification, and fashion (e.g., celebrities like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears each have inexpensive, accessible, popular fashion lines) can be attributed to the fact that postfeminism in the academic terms set out by Brooks in the late 1990s has been superseded in the twenty-first century by its cultural definition, and it is this usage which this work is primarily concerned with interrogating.

As Sarah Projansky claims, “consumerism, bodily display, and active sexuality are the routes provided by postfeminist discourses out of the (alleged) feminist-produced impasse of having to choose between work and family” (83). In a sense postfeminism is both its own route/root and its own cause. The consumption of chick lit films, novels, merchandise etc. can in part be attributed to not a dissatisfaction with feminism but with postfeminism and that it has not lived up to its promised freedom – perceiving the postfeminist has nowhere else to turn, postfeminism returns to itself.

Stephanie Harzewski’s quotes from Kavita Daswani’s novel For Matrimonial Purposes

(2005) to show how the protagonist reflects on her life of “catwalks and cocktail parties…it was fun and frivolous, but that was it” (13). After thinking about changing her ways, after a meditation class, she quickly changes her mind when The West Wing comes on TV: “So, instead I’d buy a

25 McRobbie proposes that problematically in comparison with youthful postfeminism, feminism is deemed outdated and aged (27). 20

Cosmopolitan, buy a pair of shoes, whatever…a biodegradable life, leaving nothing behind” (13).

Harzewski poignantly notes how the protagonist’s self-reflection speaks to the postfeminist condition of “mask[ing] a postlapsarian moment for romance in a world where networking trumps courtship; they [commodities] attempt to console for, in some cases, the disintegration of the family unit; and they mitigate an anxiety-based restlessness, if not a deeper emotional frustration and malaise” (13). Though one can read the proliferation of the postfeminist chick lit genre as indicative of postfeminist blues, the popular definition of postfeminism as antifeminism or backlash (Faludi) now dominates (and is attributed to media, especially to internet media generally but specifically social media – for example high profile celebrities like Kaley Cuoco from television’s The Big Bang Theory who in a Redbook interview when asked if she is a feminist replied “is it bad if I say no?”).26 There is a desire for young women to distance themselves from feminism because of the perceived negative and restrictive/prescriptive norms, egregiously propagated by media, associated with it.

Also supporting the notion that postfeminism today is aligned with its cultural definition,

Gail Finney writes, “most often the term refers to a conservative reaction against feminism, which is lambasted for its portrayal of women as victims” (123). Postfeminism in this context contests accounts, historical and contemporary, i.e., Catharine MacKinnon’s, which suggest women have been and continue to be acted upon by an oppressive patriarchy.27 Even movements such as Take

Back the Night, intended to encourage women’s strength and bring visibility to gendered violence in order to combat and confront it, Gamble argues, implicitly suggest that women are weak and

26 Cuoco has taken some heat from the feminist community in regards to her statements and since has revised and recanted some of her earlier comments – though the idea that feminism is inherently against women staying at home either as mothers or wives and/or doing any domestic work is an example of postfeminist culture’s misinformed position on feminism. 27 This idea is echoed again by Françoise Lionnet who argues that in “France there is a negative view of feminism as evidenced by Elisabeth Badinter’s Fausse route in which the former women's rights activist now accuses feminists of seeing ‘victims’ everywhere” (103). 21 vulnerable (46). This portrayal neglects to consider women’s agency as promoting patriarchy or being complicit with or resistant against patriarchy (a society which privileges the lives of men as superior in relation to women’s lives which are deemed inferior – society is typically structured to reflect this i.e. laws, labour roles, family, gender norms/expectations, reproduction, production).

An understanding of agency in relation to postfeminism, furthermore, links to a manifesto of empowerment for women and is inextricably connected with sexuality.28

Elyce Helford identifies postfeminism as promoting sexual freedom, and “the belief that personal choices and ‘bootstrap’ efforts can bring a woman (and hence all women) empowerment and equality” (Tank Girl, Postfeminist Media Manifesto). Helford’s position, echoing Katie

Roiphe’s, is that women today, having political equality, need to a) choose it and b) act on it. If a woman fails to achieve empowerment, society is not to blame, but rather the individual woman is accountable (poor decision making and a lack of exercising agency). For example, consider a woman with two children under the age of five, who after leaving her partner, continues working full time at her retail job. She enrolls in night-time courses at a local college but because of money

(day care expenses, tuition fees, loans, bills) and time (family, inflexible work hours), she does not earn her degree. Helford’s postfeminist position fails to consider deep structural and systematic barriers (cultural and legislative) to achieving equality, like a lack of child support, expensive costs for education, inflexible hours, low pay, and low job security. In a postfeminist society, individuals must accept responsibility for their life “choices.” If women freely choose, then women must be held accountable. Granted the situation I provided above is not necessarily unique to women but

28 Patricia Mann’s definition of agency is a useful starting point: it refers “to those individual or group actions deemed significant within a particular social or institutional setting. While we are accustomed to thinking in terms of distinct forms of agency, as in economic, ethical, or sexual agency, I emphasize that there are also three distinct ‘dimensions’ of agency operative either together or apart within the context of individual actions. Individual agency is always associated with one or more of the following dimensions: motivation, responsibility, and expectations of recognition or reward. I also emphasize that individual agency is typically interactive, necessarily understood in terms of relations between two or more individuals” (14). 22 that there is economic and political equality between the sexes constitutes an “equality illusion” as

Kat Banyard calls it, and the feminization of poverty is well documented.29

Can postfeminism be constructive? Though understanding the term in different ways, both

Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf claim that the backlash against feminism, which is popular postfeminism, simultaneously signals the impact of feminism and its threat to “the male-dominated establishment” (Gamble 48). Is this why Time magazine suggested “feminism” be included in a poll on the list of words to ban for 2015 (Steinmetz)? Can a rejection of feminism as a formal methodology, ideological framework, or mythology still promote women’s rights, a women’s movement, or gender justice?30 Does contemporary culture such as the reality television show The

Real Housewives of Vancouver in fact centralize women’s lives and voices? Citing popular television examples like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, Fien Adriaens suggests the critical potential of postfeminism; she writes: “post feminism not only expresses a critique, it also provides and articulates alternatives by focussing (sic) on difference, anti-essentialism and hybridism, pleading for female sexual pleasure and choice, re-evaluating the tension that existed between femininity and feminism and rejecting body politics by defining the body as key signifier for women’s identities” (4). Postfeminism, for Phoca and Wright too, signals an end to traditional feminism, which according to them is reductivist and prescriptive or as Sut Jhally categorizes it a choice between principle and pleasure (320). An aetiology of postfeminism indicates a turn in the

1990s in which “women began to feel alienated by what they saw as the policing of their sexuality”

(Phoca and Wright 170) and ultimately their pleasure.

29 For instance, Banyard’s The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women & Men Today (2010) and Poor Women in Rich Countries: The Feminization of Poverty Over the Life Course edited by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg (2009). 30 Alice Walker’s term “womanism” for example criticizes feminism for its lack of attention to and consideration of race as well as class. Though Walker admits “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” (xii). 23

Instead postfeminism “invites women to explore the complexities inscribed in the construction of the sexual subject” (Phoca and Wright 171). For this reason, postfeminism is not anti-pornography (Gamble 44) and normalizes women’s roles in pornography as reflecting personal choice and an expression of subjecthood – it is packaged as enlightened female desire and sexuality (not objectification and commodification). A legitimate contention by postfeminists is that there is inherently nothing wrong with or unnatural about a naked woman’s body (and a woman’s decision to show her body publically is her choice); censoring women’s bodies is a slippery slope because, as many anti-rape campaigns like SlutWalk proclaim, whether a woman is completely covered up and conservatively dressed, wearing clothing perceived as shocking, degrading, or “slutty,” or a woman is nude is completely irrelevant when it comes to consent.31

Censoring women’s bodies undermines this argument because it suggests there is something inappropriate or “wrong” about women’s naked bodies and that as nude or scantily clad, these women “are asking for it” as opposed to those who are covered up. “It” of course can mean either consensual sex or rape: it becomes a matter of victim-blaming, and as many feminists argue, rape is about power not lust. Yet, anti-pornography feminists at the same time argue there is a distinct difference between female nudity and pornography, and the latter is that which they take issue with.32

31 For a detailed discussion of how postfeminism and rape intersect, in particular how problematically feminist anti- rape sentiments are absorbed by postfeminist rhetoric and may reinforce cultural violence against women as well as shifting the focus to therapeutic/personal healing as opposed to political, public outrage see Projansky’s Watching Rape (2001). Projansky writes “in short, I would argue that despite some useful incorporation of aspects of feminist anti-rape arguments, both long-standing narrative forms and new postfeminist logics depoliticize feminism and feminist anti-rape activism in innumerable post-1980s films and television shows that represent rape” (120). Projansky’s position thus signals a feminist critique of the pervasiveness of representations of rape and the tenacity and ubiquity of postfeminism (237). 32 Susan Brownmiller for instance in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography writes that the “feminist objection to pornography is based on our belief that pornography represents hatred of women, that pornography's intent is to humiliate, degrade and dehumanize the female body for the purpose of erotic stimulation and pleasure. We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech” (254). Brownmiller’s position is a good 24

Additionally, postfeminism “tends to be implicitly heterosexist in orientation” (Gamble

44). For instance the recent Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (2015) shows model Hannah Davis pushing down her bikini bottoms (Shore). The vast majority of models on the website and in the magazine are young, lean, tall, and white (suggesting the emphasis on difference Brooks calls attention to has not been recognized by popular culture). The risqué cover has caused controversy, yet misogynist and postfeminist defenders of the cover alike argue that it is an expression of female sexuality and a valorization of the female body (again a white female body). The “bias within postfeminism towards the young, white, liberal and media-attractive” (Gamble 48; Anderson 1;

Projansky 87 (the latter adds men to this equation)) is clear and also ironic, given that one of its reasons according to Brooks for rejecting earlier versions of feminism is because of its white middle-class status. Supporting McRobbie’s claim that “the abandonment of critique of patriarchy is a requirement of the new sexual contract” (57), postfeminists ironically persist in suggesting it is anti-feminist to criticize women for flaunting their bodies. Thus, postfeminists view the cover of Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition as empowering for the woman and presumably women in general.

Postfeminism believes it is committed to “the empowerment of women” (Phoca and Wright

171), more precisely the empowerment of girls (the sexualizing of girls, the “girling” of adult women and the “re-embrace of girly femininity are equally related (Genz 4))33, but of course the question becomes what does it mean to empower? Is feeding into or normalizing heterosexual masculine desire and valorizing the female body according to masculine ideals empowering? How

starting point for thinking about the relationship between postfeminism and pornography albeit her definition problematically excludes LGBQT pornography. 33 For an excellent insight into the pornographication of young girls and adult women parading as girls see Lianne George’s essay “Why Are We Dressing Our Daughters Like This?” in Mcleans 1 Jan. 2007. For an in-depth discussion of the girl in the twenty-first century see All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity, ed. by Anita Harris (2004). 25 can one discern what is genuine female desire when it is marketed and sold primarily to men or packaged in such a way that females are also co-opted into consuming it? I return to these questions in the second and third chapters, but needless to say, my answer is that postfeminist female desire and sexuality is a false power and one that directly propitiates patriarchal structures and continues the structural subordination of women. Postfeminism is not and cannot be a rejection of feminism despite its claims for being so because it seeks an ideology to express sexuality (and which presupposes equality in the sense that all sexualities and sexual identities are equal to each other and should be treated as such). There is no empowerment (personal or collective) if there is inequality. Ultimately, “‘then post-feminism’ will continue to be a myth as far as the personal and public lives of women are concerned” (Coppock, Haydon, and Richter 172). Moreover, the postfeminist project of multiple identities, sexualities, and empowerment is still very much rooted in traditional feminist ideology committed to progressive social change: hence, postfeminism is an ironic, if not empty, term.

Perhaps the most compelling conception of postfeminism today, which Finney notes, is that it is “dialectical, combining the accoutrements of traditional femininity with masculine privilege...embracing conventional ideals of feminine beauty yet expecting that they as women will have equal access to the same institutions, rights and privileges that their male fellow students do. They reject the label feminist but they have internalized the goals of the ideology” (123). The internalizing of feminist goals or beliefs is one of the challenges Tasker and Negra also identify with this movement. They write that “contemporary popular culture is produced, in part at least, in response to feminism. That is, feminism forms an important part of contemporary culture” whether acknowledged or not (5).

Work like Finney’s suggests that postfeminism conflates two different strands of feminism: striving for economic and political equality, for example the right to vote (Beauvoir’s stance), and notions of essentialism, seen for instance in sexual politics of the body, and the right to have an abortion or use contraception (Irigaray’s stance). Amber E. Kinser elaborates:

It is further complicated by a now sophisticated and prolific postfeminist ideology that has

co-opted and depoliticized the central tenets of feminism. The only thing postfeminism has

to do with authentic feminism, however, is to contradict it at every turn while disguising

this agenda, to perpetuate the falsehood that the need for feminist change is outdated. (1)

If men and women are to look to feminism then it requires a paradigm shift. It is not enough for feminists to argue for a more progressive union between sexual identity and feminism or for expanding feminism’s definition of equality to include or incorporate postfeminist concerns. A radical rethinking of feminism is necessary.

One of the aims of this work then is to not only critique twenty-first century postfeminism from a feminist perspective, like others (Faludi; McRobbie; Finney; Kinser, and so on) before me have justly done but also to look for instances of resistance and politicization against mainstream postfeminist ideals, which manifest as a renewed popular feminism. Such an example is found in the recent feminist film Wild starring Reese Witherspoon – which features a young woman in crisis, in part because postfeminist ideals have to an extent failed the protagonist; she heals not through shopping or a makeover but through inward reflection, hard-core hiking, and reconnecting with feminism and her late mother. Films like Wild push back against the so-called liberating politics of postfeminist consumer culture and expose its failures, its masquerade as empowering, and the illusory, fleeting power found in a commitment to youth, beauty, glamour, overt sexuality, and conformity with patriarchal norms and expectations. Postfeminism is leading

27 women “towards a modern kind of freedom” (McRobbie 9) but it is one that operates on individualism, competition, and alienation.

To conclude, this introduction traced the emergence and development of postfeminism as a philosophy rooted in Canadian and American popular culture from the 1980s to our present day.

In doing so, it addresses several competing and often contradictory interpretations of the term

(backlash, anti, after, postmodern, feminist, and so on), and it identifies the ideas most central to understanding the movement as identity, difference, sex, family/work, pornography, rape, and freedom of choice (“still unresolved classics such as the wage gap and other forms of institutionalized sexism [a]re glossed over and ignored” (Zeisler 119)). Postfeminism in the 1980s and early 1990s concerned with the anxieties of balancing family and work mutates in the 2000s into a politics of sex, desire, and sexuality. Today’s postfeminist is decidedly modern, feminine, sexy, consuming, professionally competitive and ambitious, and/or a neo-traditionalist wife/mother: the postfeminist condition is also one of ennui, distrust, and anxiety, perpetuated by a vicious cycle of consumerism and celebrity culture. In the next chapter, I expand this critique of postfeminism and its inability to undo that which it necessarily depends upon – feminism, by analyzing how postfeminism intersects with equality. One of my main arguments is that postfeminism, though once denunciative of equality, has in the new millennium surreptitiously returned to it with vigour.

CHAPTER TWO: EQUALITY

The previous chapter demonstrates that postfeminism is a contentious philosophical concept – and various scholars (Adriaens; McRobbie; Negra; Tasker) highlight the challenges in asserting a homogeneous or singular definition. It is clear, however, that specific ideas such as equality, sexuality, agency, and freedom are repeatedly taken up and need to be better understood.

This chapter returns to the notion of equality because it remains central to the movement.

Depending on how one understands equality can and will radically alter one’s perception of postfeminism. I argue that postfeminists have not adequately dealt with equality and that their dismissal of it – and the so called declaration that gender equity has been achieved is not only false but also – is ethically unacceptable. It is also highly suspect that a theory which claims to be beyond equality, when advocating for women’s agency, necessarily invokes a distinct notion of equality.

To reiterate, part of the reason why postfeminism is deemed anti-feminist by theorists such as McRobbie and myself, and can be such a frustrating concept to work with, is precisely because of the movement’s willful amnesia and myopia. This is to say that postfeminism dismisses feminism, especially second-wave feminism, by asserting that the goals of the movement, like economic parity, have been achieved. If gender equity has been realized, feminism is no longer necessary – and thus is not an effective means for critique. Yet, as many scholars have argued, and as I have shown in the previous chapter, postfeminism uses the legacy of feminism for its existence and continuing relevance and appeal to young women. The term cannot do away with that which it necessarily depends upon: feminism, an idea committed to gender equality between the sexes, cannot be readily ignored. In fleshing out some of the difficulties that defining equality poses for postfeminists and the philosophical implications of such a standpoint, I develop my introductory thoughts on equality in relation to Simone de Beauvoir advocating egalitarian feminism and Luce

Irigaray’s commitment to sexual difference, but first, I offer two case studies pertaining to sports.

The first study considers cheerleading, and the second study analyzes cycling’s podium girls and boys. This chapter is, therefore, concerned with mapping and conceptualizing postfeminist definitions of equality by studying examples from popular culture in order to critique these viewpoints.

Case Study 1

Cheerleaders: Edmonton Eskimos and. Edmonton Oilers

Once a male only occupation, cheerleading since the mid-twentieth century has been decidedly feminine and female (Davis 150). Cheerleaders are represented in popular culture as embodying and projecting natural femininity, and, therefore, are “ideal females” (150). For audiences whose visual pleasure is committed to rigid gender norms and roles, their presence at sporting events is welcomed. As Laurel Davis notes, “the place for women in sport is seen as on the sidelines engaged in supportive activities which should not be taken too seriously” (151).

Postfeminists embrace the hierarchal sexual divisions of labour between athlete and cheerleader

(and within cheerleading also) at men’s and women’s events, but in the twenty-first century fail to reflect critically on the contradictions of their views on sexual difference and equality.

The Edmonton Eskimos, a CFL (Canadian Football League) team have cheerleaders, referred to as a Cheer Team (“Eskimos Cheer Team”). The cheerleaders, however, include members of both sexes: men and women (though they may reject the label of a certain sex). The website for the Eskimos’ Cheer Team reveals another layer: the viewer is immediately confronted with headshots from the “Dance Team” consisting of young, attractive, mostly white women34

34 Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis’ research argues that “a visit to almost any cheerleading camp, a glance through American Cheerleader, cheerleading brochures promoting camps and competitions, any catalog selling cheerleading products reveals that cheerleading squads throughout the country [United States] are primarily white” (92). 30 wearing dark green and gold bra tops. The photos emphasize ample cleavage and hard stomachs.

By contrast, the viewer must scroll further down to meet the “Stunt Team.” The Stunt Team is made up of approximately two-thirds men and one-thirds women. While the young, slightly more visibly racially diverse array of men are dressed in stylish polo shirts, the women wear the same bra tops as those in the Dance Team. There are no men on the Dance Team. On the surface, the

Edmonton Eskimos may be applauded for equal gender hiring: however, sexual divisions of labour persist and the sexual, racial, visual nature of the women remains a strong focal point.

In the NHL (National Hockey League) the Edmonton Oilers also have cheerleaders called

Octane (“Oilers Octane”). The photos for the Octane members are similar to the Edmonton Eskimo photos, though arguably less overtly sexy. While many of the headshot photos still reveal some cleavage, wearing glittery-fringed blue halter tops, the stomach is not visible. There are no male cheerleaders. Why? Is it the case that the Edmonton Oilers are more sexist than the Edmonton

Eskimos? What is it about the presence of male cheerleaders that seems so abominable or unnerving? I argue that indeed the Oilers are decidedly sexist in having female only cheerleaders

– that this breaches hiring sexism (not to mention the non-existent recruitment of males to join the team). It is a matter of equality. While it is problematic that men cannot be a part of the Dance

Team on the Edmonton Eskimos, presumably because they are ipso facto male, the presence of men on a cheerleading team does important work in undermining social stigmas and gendered divisions of labour stereotypes.

But is this really true? Can the sheer or mere presence of men on a cheerleading team undo explicit hiring sexism, hierarchal gendered divisions of labours, and defy social expectations and norms? Perhaps, but perhaps not. With the case of the Eskimos, the men are background material, like props, to support the stars, the women. Similarly, the stereotype is that male cheerleaders are

31 not only non-masculine but also homosexual (Adams and Bettis 86), which might explain why they are tolerated; they do not pose a threat to the heterosexual male or masculine economy, which functions on the exchange of women. The women are hired for their looks and athletic prowess:

(if any one of these key characteristics diminishes – they risk being dropped from the team). The men only face one of these challenges: loss of athletic performance “as strength and power are what most male cheerleaders want to emphasize in their involvement” (Adams and Bettis 88).

Looks do not seemingly factor into the equation at any point (though a positive, youthful attitude, may be its substitute). Inequality in this scenario persists.

Similarly, Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis agree with Laurel Davis that the female cheerleader is a “disturbing erotic icon” (90), but the male cheerleader is not viewed erotically. Davis writes:

Any feminist transformative potential that could have been enhanced when males reentered

cheerleading in recent times has seemingly been lost by the construction of a sexual

division of labour. The male cheerleader has become increasingly accepted because the

image he has constructed does not challenge traditional gender notions of power relations,

but rather reinforces them. Cheerleading, as a feminine preserve, remains to be seriously

challenged. (77)

While Adams and Bettis and Davis articulate a common concern about the pornification or eroticization of female cheerleaders, the sexualisation of the male cheerleader remains unimaginable. But what if the men are indeed perceived sexually? What if the men are hired for both looks and athletic ability? The polo shirt gets swapped out for a mesh v-neck tank top with skimpy booty shorts? Or, better yet, no shirt at all. In some senses of the word “equality” this is equality: both sexes are treated equally as sexual objects, paid or volunteering to entertain the

32 audience of both men, women, and children. This is the definition of postfeminist equality. A significant shift in twenty-first century popular culture is the objectification of men in the name of equality.

Why are fewer cheerleaders at women’s sports events than at men’s? Women cheerleaders in traditional costumes, presumably targeted to appeal to heterosexual male desire, perhaps do not appeal to the feminist-conscious audience at women’s sports events or to the women athletes, who may, whether they like it or not, too be singled out for “their [feminine] beauty and sexual appeal”

(Cahn 108). Highlighting women athletes’ “attractive femininity” (Cahn 183) also attempts to pacify concerns of projecting “a masculine image” and “the fear of lesbianism” (183) which potentially removes the woman as commodity from a heterosexual market. Female athletes are compelled to appeal to a perceived heterosexual audience (268) and image-conscious corporate sponsors and marketers (273). As Susan K. Cahn notes, “when women’s events do attract corporate sponsorship, investors concerned with selling their product often decide that what sells best is not women’s athletic ability but their ‘sex appeal’” (272-3). Perhaps this explains why, as Davis points out, when cheerleaders are in fact present at women’s sporting events their routines and performances designed for “the heterosexual male voyeur does not seem to be modified for an audience that is assumed to contain a large number of females” (151). Though entertainment of this kind might in fact draw more spectators to women’s events given that paycheques and funding, as well as garnering attendance, for women’s team sports like basketball or hockey is an issue.35

This is one of the arguments Davis takes up, when she discusses liberal feminism. Liberal feminists, in the context of women’s sports, believe women are entitled to the same products,

35 Some sports like tennis are fairly even when awarding prize money to men and women. 33 funding, time, and space as men’s sports; thus, the inclusion of cheerleaders too is seen as fair

(152).

Part of the liberal feminist rhetoric used to rationalize the presence of cheerleaders is that if “women athletes should be perceived primarily as athletes, not as women…[then] cheerleaders should be seen as cheerleaders, not as males or females” (Davis 152). A critique of gender oppression is silenced by postfeminist and liberal philosophy which pretends to negate the gender of the performer therein avoiding the pitfalls named earlier for women athletes pressured to be attractive, desirable, and as Irigaray might say, “contained.” Not surprisingly, as Davis’ research highlights, gender is never genderless, and many female cheerleaders are not interested in cheering for women’s teams (153) because of heterosexual norms and sexist attitudes towards women’s sports as being of lesser value than men’s sports. The fact that cheerleaders (and their coaches or coordinators) often work for free or are paid much less than athletes because cheerleading is not officially recognized as a sport (Adams and Bettis 57) is not only a gender equity issue but also a gender issue.36 For instance, at National Football League games, the cheerleaders (who are predominantly females) are paid pittance in comparison with the male players, not to mention that the “activity generates money – lots of money – to the tune of close to a billion dollars a year”

(Adams and Bettis 111). The reward of spectacle, performing in front of a large crowd (on site and on television), and one’s talent displayed on the Jumbotron, is somehow payment enough.

Ultimately, a major complication with cheerleading is taxonomy.

36 In “Don’t Bring it On: The Case Against Cheerleading as a Collegiate Sport” Andrew B. Johnson and Pam R. Sailors, like Adams and Bettis highlight good reasons why cheerleading should not be considered a sport. One reason being that schools may use it to abuse Title IX guidelines: if cheerleading is considered a female sport, it might allow other female sports like softball to be dropped. It would allow schools to eliminate co-ed cheering as well because co- ed sports cannot be categorized as female sports (Adams and Bettis 59; Johnson and Sailors 257). The Women’s Sports Foundation is the United States calls cheerleading an extracurricular activity or athletic activity, but it is not a sport. The patriarchal definition of sport, however, should be taken into consideration when determining whether cheerleading is or is not a sport. 34

How one categorizes cheerleading (Andrew B. Johnson and Pamela R. Sailors identity three types: sideline, hybrid, and competitive (257) – my argument concerns only the first two)37and cheerleaders, as entertainers, motivators, and/or athletes, can have not only social consequences but also moral, philosophical, and legal ones.38 If cheerleaders are considered entertainers and motivators, potentially cheerleaders have the power to disrupt heteronormativity, by putting forth a hyperbolized girl power when performing at women’s sporting events. Davis refers to the presence of cheerleaders at women’s sporting events as symptomatic of a postmodern paradox because the “roles of athlete and cheerleader have always been gendered within our society” (150). Likewise, a men-only squad could do the same work at a men’s event. On the flip side, women cheerleaders at a women’s sporting event may only amplify the trend of woman as spectacle, as show, as object and perpetuate apoliticism. The postfeminist must ask herself, should women’s teams, like hockey games in the WHL, first have cheerleaders and then second if they would be women-only, mixed sex, or men-only? If cheerleaders add to the entertainment value of a sport and ticket sales, surely it is a mistake and a transgression of equality, not to include teams comprised of both genders or men-only teams (mimicking the present status quo, i.e. cheerleading

37 Johnson and Sailors argue that for moral, legal, and philosophical reasons, given Title IX guidelines, no form of cheerleading should be considered a sport: they define each type in detail: “Sideline is what most of us imagine when we think of cheerleading: predominantly female cheerleaders supporting athletic teams by attempting to raise the spirits of the spectators at sporting events by means of cheering and the performance of acrobatic stunts, and often through the use of aids like pompoms, signs, banners, and megaphones. Hybrid cheerleading squads engage in sideline cheerleading, but they are more likely to include males and they also participate in one or more competitions each year with other squads where no supporting role is provided. Competitive cheer squads do not engage in sideline cheering at all, only competing against other competitive squads in events held by a very small number of for-profit cheer organizations. Insofar as this activity deserves the name cheer, however, it includes actions aimed at generating crowd enthusiasm, such as the yelling of cheers and the waving of signs” (257). 38 Another layer to this dynamic is the female sportscaster/reporter. Recent publicity surrounding reporter Shauna Hunt who incurred verbal abuse from male fans at a Toronto soccer game in May 2015 (“Shauna Hunt Confronts Men about ‘FHRITP’ Vulgarity”) is a good example. The two men who were caught on camera taunting her were condemned on social media and their actions deemed indefensible. Yet, this should be concerning because while female reporters want to be taken seriously and judged on their professional abilities and not on their physical appearance or gender, cheerleaders, in order to “succeed,” must be gendered. A pleasing appearance, in addition to her skills, is mandatory. She embodies objectification, though of course a verbal display of sexual harassment towards a cheerleader, would undoubtedly not sit well with the public. A consideration of female fans and their role in woman’s place/space would be another meaningful angle to pursue. 35

Team Canada has co-ed and women only squads) at women’s games. If payment is not a viable option, men should volunteer for these coveted positions, so the postfeminist argument taken to its logical conclusion suggests. But, how would the postfeminist public respond to such a flagrant display of equality?

As I have argued, the newest instantiation of postfeminism is gynosexist, which is women’s sexual desire for and objectification of men: it is unapologetic, upfront, and in your face.39 While the movement makes no effort to hide its support of women’s objectification and consumption by men, women, too, while still in the early stages, are asserting men’s objectification and consumption by women (and, possibly, in the near future, by men, too). Postfeminism clearly draws on the concept of equality in a multitude of ways: it needs equality to justify its acceptability and relevance. It is a theory of an eye for an eye, a tit for a dick. And, while some feminists and postfeminists (who identify as feminist) believe that the commodification of men can disrupt the power of patriarchy, this dissertation suggests, however, that this remains dubious to feminists committed to combatting objectification and exploitation. The Tour de France is my next case study because it exemplifies the postfeminist shift towards objectifying men that I have identified.

A brief discussion of the men’s event is followed by a lengthier one on the women’s event in order to show how cycling, like cheerleading, is a complex sport not immune to gender dynamics and the exploitation of women.

Case Study 2

The Tour de France: Podium Girls and Podium Boys

39 I use the term gynosexist because misandry is the hatred of men and doesn’t quite articulate sexual objectification. Similarly, Ariel Levy’s term “female chauvinist pig” accurately describes women upholding patriarchy and masculine values by embracing and emulating “raunch culture,” but the term cannot and does not really encompass the particularity of postfeminist women’s investment in objectifying men. 36

The Tour de France is one of the most prestigious annual cycling competitions for men.

The tour lasts for approximately three weeks, traverses several countries, and consists of several stages. The winners of each stage, including the overall winners, receive a jersey, prize money, and a kiss from two podium girls or tour hostesses (hôtesses du Tour). Podium girls, who one hopes are legally not girls, are the only women visibly a part of the tour. Attractive, young, thin, and on camera, silent (which is ironic because they are in part chosen for their linguistic abilities), hostesses, who function as accessories, contribute to a highly masculinized sport. Hostesses must promote a flawless appearance and an enthusiastic demeanor. Competition is intense

(approximately 20 girls are selected out of 500 applications (Flury)). Furthermore, as in cheerleading, a lack of racial and cultural diversity, in the sport and among the hostesses for both the men’s races and the women’s races, is problematic.40

In addition to her on-camera duties, a podium girl serves food and drinks and socializes with event organizers and sponsors off-camera. She is not, however, permitted to interact with the riders apart from at the award ceremony (though of course this happens fairly often), and presumably explains why rider Peter Sagan felt entitled to touch Maya Leye’s buttocks during an awards ceremony at the Tour of Flanders in 2013.41 The incident sparked social media criticism including Jane Aubrey, editor of Australian cyclingnews.com, calling for gender justice because

Leye experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. Similarly, cyclist Dave Dee tweeted: “Now a chance for enlightened tour organisers to drop podium girls,” (as qtd. in Bamford) and journalist

Ned Boulting argued: “It’s seen as completely normal to have podium girls but it doesn’t need to be. If they ceased to exist [as a feature of cycling] overnight, no one would miss them” (as qtd. in

Bamford). Like cheerleaders, podium girls are professional entertainers venerated for their looks,

40 Susan K. Cahn argues that racial discrimination and accessibility to minorities is prevalent in all sports (271). 41 For instance, rider George Hincapie married former podium girl Melanie Simoneau. 37 but unlike cheerleaders, they are paid marginally better (for the 2010 Tour of Britain, the girls received 50£ a day: there is no women’s Tour of Britain (See)). The presence of podium girls throws into sharp relief one aspect of sexism in cycling.

Podium girls are not unique to the Tour de France, e.g. Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España

Tour of Alberta, but podium boys were unique to the Course by Le Tour de France (the women’s version was reinitiated after its drop in 1989) in 2014. The women’s race, a single stage, through

Paris, includes female cyclists, female police officers, and an all-female jury. The prize money awarded was 22 500 Euros, the same as the men’s for this stage (Singer), and the winner received a kiss from two men. Yet, when the Dutch cyclist Marianne Vos (who?) won the race last year, few fans came to support her, and the media, what media there was, paid little attention, as the men’s event (which ended a few hours after the women’s race) dominated attention and resources.

The inauguration of podium boys in women’s cycling is a bold attempt to placate fans and racers and distract from the rampant inequality present in professional cycling.

The postfeminist claim that society is now beyond equality is another way of claiming that society is beyond inequality. Yet, the women’s Course by Le Tour de France subverts this egregious assumption. The challenges for women’s cycling are how to define and how to achieve equality while raising sponsorship, broadening public appeal, and garnering media support.

However, as Jen See of Podium Cafe argues, “what women cyclists need is more bike races, more press about their bike races, and more money. And those things won't come from taking away the podium [girls’] kisses.” Can the inclusion of podium boys alone do this? No. So why did the organization decide to add them to the event? The organization added boys to the women’s event in order to suppress criticism about the continued inclusion of podium girls at the men’s event.

The postfeminist logic is one of equality: men receive kisses from beautiful girls; it is only fair,

38 women receive kisses from beautiful boys. The organization refuses to self-reflect on whether or not having podium girls at the men’s events is sexist and complicit with objectification.

An exploration of some of the other equality options leads to a further complexification of the subject. For instance, in terms of gender equality, surely, given that if the women’s sport does not have podium boys, the men’s sport should do away with podium girls altogether. Or, why not have both podium boys and girls at both events? The sport’s acute subscription to heterosexuality indicates acute homophobia. What is problematic about a man receiving a kiss from a podium boy, a woman receiving a kiss from a podium girl? The very same question pertaining to women arose when The Flanders Diamond Tour 2015 winners received their awards from podium girls in black bikinis. Journalist Marijn de Vries quickly took to Twitter posting a snapshot and writing “what an utter disgrace.” Cyclist Anna Zivarts followed by posting a photoshopped image of last year’s men’s Tour de France winner, Chris Froome, on a podium surrounded by nearly nude men with this tongue-in-cheek comment “podium equality.” Zivarts highlights pernicious gender inequality in the sport, but the recent scandal at the Tour de Flanders also adds another layer to the critical discussion of equality which must occur.

Equality and Difference: Beauvoir and Irigaray

Remembering that in The Second Sex Beauvoir urges women to enter public life and demand full socio-political and economic equality is a good place to start in terms of thinking about the previous case studies. One of Beauvoir’s primary criticisms of patriarchal societies is that equality, which is denied to women, is actually an inalienable right that all human beings possess. To deny women equality is to deny women that which is fundamental to being human: thus patriarchies are unethical, not to mention flawed from a logical perspective. In Beauvoir’s philosophy, the concept of the second sex, which women occupy, is fallacious – social hierarchies

39 in which women are the second sex in comparison to the first sex, do not, nor can they represent an ontological sex hierarchy. How this might play out in the worlds of cheerleading and cycling, however, is a contentious and complicated matter.

In her chapter “The Young Girl,” Beauvoir extends her concern about women’s passivity and lack of subjectivity in the world when she discusses sports (353-6). Beauvoir claims that girls, on the precipice of adolescence (marked by menstruation), are expected by society to abandon physical exertion and violence: “they must give up emerging beyond what is given and asserting themselves above other people: they are forbidden to explore, to venture, to extend the limits of the possible. In particular, the competitive attitude, most important to young men, is almost unknown to them” (354). The propensity and possibility to express violence, reads Beauvoir, is paramount for active, authentic participation in the world. While men’s actions can and do change the world, women are compelled to submit; “the world is defined without reference to her, and its aspect is immutable as far as she is concerned” (355). Beauvoir continues to claim importance for women’s involvement in activities like sports. The risk of non-engagement effects not only the individual but also society; “This lack of physical power leads to a more general timidity…she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation, she can take in society only a place already made for her” (355). Beauvoir insists young girls must take on such so-named “masculine protest[s]” (428), and participate in sports, particularly violent ones.

Active involvement in sports, experienced through woman’s body has the ability to transform society and woman’s role in it. Ursula Tidd refers to this as “assuming her physicality and appropriating space in the world” (66). For instance, one question that can be posed is whether women cyclists should compete against men cyclists? If this were the case then gender differences

(regardless of whether or not one subscribes to difference) would be rendered obsolete in terms of

40 the racers: women athletes would be eligible to compete for much, much more money, have access to better courses, ride longer races, and receive more media coverage and attention. This for some, instantiates post-gender equality, and I suspect is part of the same logic used when including male cheerleaders at events. In rejecting this position, Irigaray’s and Beauvoir’s views align.

Beauvoir does not suggest women should compete against men: when equality is carried out to this extreme; women, for reasons of physicality, come out on the losing end. Beauvoir provides the analogy of a featherweight boxing champion as no less worthy than the heavyweight boxing champion as being the same as the “woman ski-ing champion [who] is not the inferior of the faster male champion” (356-7): she writes, “they belong to different classes” (357), though both are categorized by the more universal title in each case, boxer and skier. Her solution is to foster women’s competition and encourage physical activity. Beauvoir claims, “It is precisely the female athletes who, being positively interested in their own game, feel themselves least handicapped in comparison with the male” (357). Girls and women must be encouraged to assert their physicality, transcend prescribed roles of immanence and dependency, and resist societal norms like femininity which “kills spontaneity, her lively exuberance” (358). Does the new-age, muscular, and athletic cheerleader not fulfill Beauvoir’s requirements? Cheerleading, as competitions clearly show, is athletic and physically demanding, but clearly the demand for physicality, which Beauvoir believed might break the spell of femininity, is not enough.

Cheerleading is comfortable with the contradiction that it promotes a strong physical body but one that does not undermine its inclusion as an erotic object for male desire. The outward appearance of the cheerleader (which is as important if not more so than her physical ability), from her short skirt and bra top to her made-up, youthful appearance, still very much caters to ideals of femininity and male desire. Beauvoir might respond that the cheerleader still constitutes a refusal to take

41 charge of one’s existence or to assert one’s self fully in the world. The predicted result is frustration, “tension and ennui” (358), which explains in part why postfeminist consumption and a strict adherence to femininity, so as not to diminish her social value, cannot offer women autonomy or fulfillment.

Irigaray, likewise, in her stance on sexual difference, argues women must be recognized and validated as different: To pit women racers against men racers, in the name of equality, according to Irigaray’s thinking is absurd.42 Monserrat Martín, working in the field of rugby union studies, writes that in order for women players to be taken seriously “it is assumed that in order to overcome discrimination, women in rugby settings need to challenge the hegemonic masculinity by mimicking it and denying any traces of femininity (185). Martín, however, like Irigaray, argues for the need for a feminine space within sports and is perhaps one reason why, despite, as Beauvoir and Irigaray insist, women racers having their own races, has not brought the cyclists equality. On the level of egalitarian feminism, a lack of encouragement, interest, and funding overshadows the sport but so does a denial of the feminine in favour of the universal masculine subject and “the utopia of [sexual] indifferentiation” (Goux 182-3). Women’s cycling, by mimicking men’s cycling, compels women to devalue the feminine. Irigaray writes, “for a woman to give up her sexuate identity ‘represents the greatest possible submission to a masculine culture’” (Goux 182), and she lays out how patriarchal culture and attitudes are responsible.

In her essay “Women on the Market,” Irigaray writes, “The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women” (170). Upon these foundations, she explains that

42 As Montserrat Martín notes, “Irigaray’s sexual difference theory has had very little impact on sport feminism studies,” but likewise, Irigaray says little about sports. In her chapter “Teaching How to Meet in Difference,” Irigaray discusses how traditional educations for children does not provide a civic education. She believes that competitive sport teaches children to repress desire and to problematically allow “boys and girls to remain or return amongst the same as them without confronting each other in bodily difference” (203). Irigaray thus encourages mixed sports for children so that they learn “to awaken consideration and respect for difference(s)” (204). 42 our economic, social and cultural order has been organized for the benefit of men. She asks, why are women the objects of exchange for men, but men are not the objects of exchange for women?

(171). According to her argument, women's bodies have provided the conditions that have made social and cultural life possible in the terms that men have interpreted them. The matter of the

‘sexualized female’ has so preoccupied the minds of men that they can interpret social and cultural life in no other way. “All systems of exchange that organize patriarchal societies,” she explains,

“are men’s business” and the productive world, or the “objects to be used,” women, become objects of transaction among men only (174), which Irigaray deems a “hom(m)o-sexuality” (175). She writes, “Reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself, of relations among men” (175). Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference entails that women’s sports, the feminine, not be defined in opposition to and in relation to men’s sports and the masculine.

An uncritical notion of sexual difference as Susan Birrell and Nancy Theberge argue can have problematic consequences for female athletes. Sexual difference, which Beauvoir too notes in her example of the skier, can “produce an image of women as physically inferior to men…and is used more subtly as a rationale for the social inferiority of women” (“Ideological Control of

Women in Sport” 346). Sexual difference, as defined by patriarchal society, Birrell and Theberge warn, leads to a hierarchy between the sexes, as evident in (mis/under) representations of women athletes in the media, the trivialization of women athletes, the objectification of female athletes, homophobia in sports, and “the construction of women as unnatural athletes and of female athletes as unnatural women” (347). Therefore, the sexual difference that Irigaray speaks of cannot reinforce a masculine-defined notion which privileges the lives of men.

In rethinking examples like women’s cycling, Jean-Joseph Goux believes that Irigaray is advocating for “[a] more positive and innovative horizon, the emergence of new values that will allow us to live sexual difference, which means as well the difference of bodies, voices, languages, rights, genealogies, gods – the difference in subject-object and subject-subject relations” (183).

Before an ethical relationship based on civility and reciprocity can take place between the sexes, an affirmation of the feminine, as an irreducible sex – difference, represented and embodied, must occur. Susan Birrell and Diana M. Richter in “Is a Diamond Forever? Feminist Transformations of Sport” echo this view by providing the example of women’s softball players and teams who identify as feminist. The example is a promising case in point for demonstrating Irigaray’s concern about how assimilation and sameness between the sexes (especially given the affordances of modern technology) perpetuate a patriarchal society, the reign of the masculine-neutral, which refuses to acknowledge, and furthermore denies, the feminine in any meaningful way.

Birrell and Richter describe how despite legal changes in sports,43 “they actually represent the accommodation of women within a system of male sport which remains virtually unchanged despite the increased presence of women” (222). As the authors note, many feminist athletes are critical of the masculinist or “male model” institutionalization of sport and experience it as “rigid, hierarchical, conservative, elitist and alienating” (225). The softball study offered is a feminist alternative which aims to resist “masculinist hegemony and dominant, male-sustained definitions of sport” (242) and is enacted in several ways: a different relation to the opponent as other, social inclusion (based on age, race, class, size, etc.), enfranchising those with less skill, enforcing non- hierarchical authority, de-emphasizing winning, and refusing to endanger a player or put a player in a high-risk situation. This example shows how sport can be a potential site for feminist cultural

43 In the US, Title IX “of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in any institution receiving federal funds” (Costa and Guthrie 237) 44 struggle, collective resistance, and socio-political transformation (Birrell and Theberge, “Feminist

Resistance and Transformation in Sport” 363).

Women cyclists, likewise, must first cultivate a genealogy amongst themselves – a female- centered focus that employs egalitarian feminism as a practical and temporary political/economic means to survive but one that anticipates the limits of this patriarchal equality: distancing the sport from gender norms and expectations defined by masculinist culture is essential for a new female genealogy. Irigaray asks her readers to “leave a world of madness which is not our own …[and] not again kill the mother who was immolated at the birth of our culture” (qtd. in Muraro 321).

Asserting a sexuate identity that respects difference, for “justice requires that we equally respect the characteristics or the merits of both sexes,” (“Teaching: How to Meet in Difference” 217) will lead to a new “woman-to-woman sociality” (Irigaray 190). An Irigarayan perspective on sports teaches this respect for difference, not as site for conflict and wars (“Listening, Thinking,

Teaching” 240), or as a marker that must be subjected to sameness (gender-neutral) but as a means for relating to each other and propagating civility.

The inclusion of podium girls and now podium boys is not the new equality horizon that either Irigaray or Beauvoir envisions. Their presence keeps heterosexuality as the dominant referent, thereby concealing the operations of the hom(m)o-sexuality which “regards women only as objects, not partners, and that persecutes those (homosexuals) who make explicitly and perhaps retain the potential to subvert phallocentric sexual circuits” (Grosz 346). It is important, if ethical relations between the sexes are to be realized, women’s cycling should abandon the presence of podium boys, where men are objects, not partners.

It is only after positively asserting difference, Irigaray argues, that new ethical relations between the sexes can emerge. Elizabeth Grosz clarifies,

When women have a place or space in which to live their bodies, sexualities, and identities,

the false duality or symmetry of phallic domination – where woman is seen as man’s

negative double, modeled on an economy of the same – can be shattered. When women can

represent themselves, and the world, from the perspectives or spaces of women, the two

sexes may be able to encounter each other. (347)

Therefore, criticism against women wearing bikinis while presenting awards at a women’s cycling event evidences a lack of respect for the riders (and arguably women in general) but even more so, though less obviously so, a cultivated homophobia. The fear is that if women in bikinis can attend women’s events, men in risqué outfits might attend men’s events. Zivarts’ image of Froome surrounded by male models intimates this equality, this post-feminist utopia. One has to ask if it is the clothing (or lack thereof) that is offensive, the gender of the podium presenter, his or her sexual orientation, or perhaps a combination thereof. Presumably when podium girls are dressed

“respectably,” their presence is tolerated, but why should it matter? In nearly every case, women

(whether as podium girls or cyclists) become scapegoats for inequalities perpetuated by patriarchy, and as such are pitted against one another. Arguably the more clothing, the more the concealment of gender inequalities persist, while the offensive bikinis leave little, if any, place for patriarchal inequality to hide.

Arguably this is where the postfeminist stance could do some good for women in the sport and ‘turn its life around’ so to speak: the exaggeration of sexuality could lead some to seriously question this unfairness, but sadly, instead of using situations like the Tour de Flanders to exemplify disparity, postfeminism justifies and defends it (after all the presence of women in bikinis at sporting events is hardly new). Having podium girls and cheerleaders cite their work in positive terms of empowerment, such as enjoying high status and visibility, seeing themselves as

46 preserving tradition, acting as role models for younger children, and testing out sexual expectations of womanhood (Adams and Bettis 84), makes it easy for educational institutions, organizers, and event sponsors to continue supporting the roles. For instance, former podium girl and PhD student in Biology, Magalie Thierry embraces the postfeminist attitude when describing her role: “Maybe the ceremony could seem out of date but most of the public loves it. I think podium girls give a little touch of femininity to this sport” (as qtd. in Flury). If educated postfeminist girls actively choose such positions and relish them, then the postfeminist logic retorts to feminist critiques that explaining the girls’ presence is completely unnecessary, as is recognizing the supposed gender problems and exploitation such roles propagate.

Though Beauvoir and Irigaray differ on how they perceive equality for women being enacted and lived, a return to their work in relation to sport is productive for pushing back against the proliferation of postfeminist philosophy in popular culture: to reiterate, both writers’ works address and condemn the kind of postfeminist equality we are currently witnessing. Beauvoir, while adamant that women recognize their agency, did not intend for women to imitate men in ways that perpetuate patriarchy: her critique of femininity, as “passivity and accepted dependency”

(355), for instance stems from the fact that patriarchal culture subordinates women by promulgating the myth that women are essentialized ontologically as “the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless” (283), “a transcendental Idea, timeless, unchangeable, necessary” (282).

Activities like cheerleading reinforce this problematic inscription and equation of women as inherently feminine and work to conceal the “contingent, and multiple existences of actual women.

... If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine” (283). This explains why some women, who may possess the

47 physical requirements to be a cheerleader, are not chosen – they do not have the postfeminist,

‘feminine’ look.

Women cannot achieve full equality if they continue to cling to the traditional gender norms of patriarchy, which put forth an idea of the Eternal Feminine. Irigaray, too, argues these points about a masculine-defined feminine and/or a genderless society but extends her criticism further, warning women to not repeat the acts of the father: acting in a masculinist way is a blind, mad, and murderous endeavour. In mimicking the acts of men, women continue the patriarchal tradition of matricide. Postfeminism does not radically transform patriarchal culture nor offer a means of resistance for women. The claim to subjecthood remains masculine and so-called empowerment directly feeds back into the system: it has not been altered: women, as always, have adapted to it.

In summation, while Irigaray characterizes how patriarchal societies in the west function by way of “exchanging” women and commodifying women, she does not articulate how women too can be “exchangers” in postfeminist society. Likewise, Beauvoir argues that women must join the ranks of men in public life, but she provides few details on how this will occur or why men might not also occupy traditional women’s spaces as an instantiation of equality. Both philosophies fall short of theorizing that in a postfeminist patriarchy women too can exchange other women and women can exchange men without seriously challenging the status quo. This exchange is done in the name of equality, “an indefinite play of substitution and interchangeability” in an economy whose logic “incorpora[tes] everything without residue” (Goux 188). The case studies on cheerleading and podium girls and boys in popular culture evidences how postfeminism still clings to a notion of gender equality in its articulations. Analyses of these two examples confirm that in twenty-first century popular culture the gynosexist objectification of men, in addition to the

48 objectification of women (female chauvinism), is rationalized by way of equality, albeit a corrupted and co-opted notion that continues the subordination of women and other marginalized peoples.

CHAPTER THREE: SEXUALITY

This work demarcates two core areas of (post)feminist philosophy – equality and sexuality

– but it by no means suggests a strict delineation between these concepts. In fact, as the last chapter has shown, with its examples of cheerleading and podium girls/boys, one cannot really think about feminist equality without thinking about sexuality and vice versa. Sexual equality, to use Christine

A. Littleton’s term, might even communicate both concepts nicely. The purpose of this final chapter, however, is to build on the overall argument that postfeminism perpetuates an anti- feminist stance whilst propagating empowerment and equality for women. Sue Jackson and Tiina

Vares suggest that young girls and women today must negotiate “embodied identities in postfeminist cultural contexts where dominant meanings of femininity emphasise the body and its sexuality” (348). The chapter, therefore, examines and critiques postfeminist sexuality (equality, femininity, mimesis, and empowerment) by focusing on Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s philosophies in relation to examples from popular culture like the recent opening of the restaurant Tallywackers and the music video “I Luh Ya Papi” by Jennifer Lopez.

Both philosophers address and reject the role of women, particularly as sexual objects, as commodities, in a patriarchal, capitalist system. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels, Beauvoir and Irigaray suggest that patriarchy is inextricably bound to the economy. For this reason their work is important when critiquing postfeminism, which to reiterate, promotes the sexual objectification of women in a capitalist, consumerist society as empowering, i.e., women posing nude or semi-nude for the cover of magazines. McRobbie notes that “consumer culture, the tabloid press, the girl’s and women’s magazine sector, the lads’ magazines and also downmarket, trashy television all encourage young women, as though in the name of sexual equality, to overturn the old double standard and emulate the assertive and hedonistic styles of sexuality associated with

50 young men” (84). Beauvoir and Irigaray caution women against emulating men in the ways

McRobbie describes. The female empowerment postfeminists champion is a masquerade and a remasculinization of culture, which reinforces the capitalist, patriarchal system, and, therefore, the subordination of women. This thinking, I will show, is likewise productive when analyzing and critiquing the newest trend in postfeminism: gynosexism, the sexual objectification of men by women.

In order to combat the sexualisation of women, hyper-femininity, and consumerism within postfeminism, Beauvoir’s theory suggests woman must assert her subjectivity, as man’s equal, which will come about only when she deliberately casts off patriarchal-defined femininity.

Irigaray, on the other hand, suggests that a patriarchal society imprisons woman to such a great extent that the only role available to women is to mimic their inferiority, their so-called femininity.

Women’s mimicking of a patriarchal-defined femininity reveals incongruence: “they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere” (This Sex 76). Irigaray, like

Beauvoir, condemns patriarchal femininity and argues for an ethical relation between the sexes.

For Beauvoir this ethical relation begins when men and women accept that a priori, despite any differentiation based on sex, men and women are equal being human and society should reflect this. Irigaray, meanwhile holds out on the possibility for a feminine identity, a sexual difference outside of and not in relation to the binary of woman and man in patriarchal societies. The first section is an exegesis of the sexual economy, as found in Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s dialogues with

Marxism and underscores how both critics interrogate patriarchy and capitalism and thus postfeminism. The second section evaluates the political potential of mimesis as a strategy for undermining postfeminist idealizations of feminine sexuality and normative feminine beauty aesthetics, which are touted as empowering. The chapter concludes by arguing that the latest

51 development in postfeminist sexuality, gynosexism, fails as an example of ethical equality between the sexes.

The Sexual Economy

Like Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s examinations of patriarchy, postfeminist ideology begins with, or at least reflects for some time on, the economy – the production, circulation, and consumption of goods or commodities. Postfeminist scholars, however, downplay the importance of economy to the movement, most likely because its commitment to capitalist consumption is well established (Jackson and Vares 348). Consider the book, TV series, and films for Sex and the

City. The protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) shops through her relationship problems and, despite her alleged economic woes, has an infamous penchant for

Manolo Blahniks. The belief is that capitalist consumption is empowering for women and because economic parity between the sexes has been realized, women are able to express their independence from men and their equality to men as powerful economic purchasers.

McRobbie notes that it is women’s capacity to earn a wage that allows women to purchase cultural capital, i.e., femininity.

It is the wage earning capacity on the part of young women which is the critical factor that

underpins the exuberance of the commercial domain, as commerce embraces the

possibilities opened up by the disposable income of young women, who are now expected

to not just have an occupation, but to prioritize earning a living as a means of acquiring

status, ensuring an independent livelihood, and gaining access to the world of feminine

good and services. (72)

An income of one’s own provides the young woman with the means to buy beauty products and fashionable clothing, shoes, accessories, etc., which are all requirements for her cultural capital

52 and status in a postfeminist world. Her income, however, circulates back into the postfeminism economy, an economy which continuously sells her an image of femininity that she can never fulfill. This is seen for example in women like Heidi Montag who has gone to extreme lengths with plastic surgery to increasingly look more “feminine” and “beautiful.” If she ceases to play at

“the post-feminist masquerade,” she risks being rejected from this so-called privileged position

(McRobbie 67).

Because choice is lauded by postfeminists as a definitive mark that our society no longer needs feminism, McRobbie rejects the premise that the postfeminist feminine look is freely chosen

(66). She points to the authoritative beauty regimen western societies valorize; thus, on the surface it appears that it is not men per se who make women conform to femininity but women who make other women conform to femininity. On closer inspection, however, one realizes, the postfeminist masquerade is indicative of male coercion, albeit this is cleverly disguised: the masquerade is a defense mechanism adopted by women navigating “the terrain of hegemonic masculinity” (67), because femininity, unlike feminism, is deemed non-threatening to the status quo, the masculine economy. Vicki Coppock, Deena Haydon, and Ingrid Richter in The Illusions of ‘Post-Feminism’ suggest that a major problem with postfeminist discourse, pertaining to so-called equal opportunities for women, is that this “‘liberation’ remains within male-defined parameters.

Women can succeed but only on men’s terms in a man’s world” (181). Masculine economies do in fact incorporate and give space to women; they might even make a particular woman especially successful, superficially answering the feminist call for equality, e.g., Hugh Hefner’s daughter,

Christie Ann Hefner, is the former chair and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. Afraid of risking her new status and earning capacity within the patriarchal economy, however, the postfeminist masquerade signals not a choice but a capitulation and a re-masculinization of culture.

And, although Beauvoir and Irigaray stress that there is very good reason to trace inequality between the sexes to economic circumstances, especially the links between capitalism and patriarchy, the notion that economic equality will eradicate all other inequalities (violence or the threat of violence for women; lack of concern for women’s health, safety, etc.) is simply false.

Each argues that patriarchal societies are based on a symbolic economy regulated, understood, defined, and put into place by men for men. This ontology can be understood in economic terms of the Greek word oikonomos, which has the sense of one who manages a household or family

(“Economy”). Capitalism, as a mode of oikonomos, is patriarchal because it operates as a masculine economy privileging the position of man in opposition and in relation to woman, including structuring and constructing the material and social spheres. Margaret Whitford writes that “patriarchy is defined by Irigaray as ‘an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers, and the competition between brothers’” (24). It is also clear from works like “Women on the Market,” that Irigaray theorizes patriarchy as a “hom(m)o-sexuality,” an economic exchange premised upon woman's position as commodity. She understands the commodity in terms of its exploitation, use, exchange and alienation (ideas indebted to Marx, Engels and tacitly Hegel).

While not the most prolific feminist critics of Marxism, both Beauvoir and Irigaray render a feminist re-reading of Marx and Engel’s critique of capital in The Communist Manifesto that is pertinent for critiquing postfeminism.44 Irigaray suggests that Marx’s descriptions of capitalism, commodities, and the means of production can be applied to patriarchy, that is to say that in a late

44 See for example Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell who argue that Marx’s narrow definition of production describes man as producer and not necessarily nor intentionally woman. Benhabib and Cornell argue that Marx’s insistence on production as the true means for human fulfillment and societal integration precludes women from wholly joining because of their roles in reproduction and they maintain that it is not enough for feminists like Heidi Hartmann to argue for a more progressive union between Marxism and feminism or for expanding Marx’s definition of production to include or incorporate women’s reproductive activities such as childbearing or childrearing. A radical rethinking of production itself is necessary. Similarly, Iris Young, like Benhabib and Cornell, elaborates that if Marx and Engels’ concept of production has no place for domestic gender relations between men and women, then the theory is inadequate in conceiving production (50). 54 capitalist patriarchal society like ours, women function as commodities.45 In our postfeminist age, however, I argue that women now willingly take on and embrace the role of thing-hood

(commodity). Furthermore, postfeminism suggests that reproduction (which Marx and Engels preclude as non-production) has not hindered women from being incorporated as reproducers/producers in the capitalist economy. Adopting this dual-function position, commodity/producer does not alter patriarchy, but feeds directly back into it an economy which operates on heterosexuality, extreme femininity, and increasing women's visualization/objectification.

D. Rita Alfonso writes that according to Irigaray “the reduction of the feminine to the places she provides for man is at the basis of her sexual objectification, instrumentalization, and political subjugation” (104). Drawing on other feminist theorists (Cynthia Freeland; Elizabeth

Grosz; Tina Chanter), Alfonso emphasizes that understanding the feminine as such corollaries into women as property without recourse to determining their own bodies (abortion, pregnancy,

“rapeable bodies”) (104). Furthermore, as commodities “women’s sexuality is disciplined, constructed, controlled and regulated” (Fahs 180). One such example is former Playboy model and girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, Holly Madison. Madison posed nude for Playboy, online and in print, but she also began a career on the production side and worked at the studio.

45 Marx and Engels present these ideas by analyzing the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in modern European Industrial society. While Irigaray, does suggest the relationship between man and woman is hierarchical, it is somewhat misguided to equate man with bourgeoisie and woman with proletariat. Because Marx and Engels were concerned with production, and therefore mostly with the lives of men, in their terms men occupy the position of both bourgeois and proletariat. Possibly because women are traditionally associated with reproduction not production, she occupies the space of commodity, thing-hood, an object to be exchanged and valued by men. The goal of communism as Marx and Engels envisioned is a classless society – arguably as Chapter Two suggests Beauvoir might be intimating at a genderless society (this is the direction Butler takes) – but Irigaray does not desire the erasure of sexual difference, though she does want to abolish the sexual hierarchy. On a similar note, Beauvoir rejects Engels’ reduction of the opposition of the sexes to a class conflict” because “she [woman] would not think of eliminating herself as a sex” (66). 55

As Irigaray notes, “Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it” (“Women” 184), which aptly characterizes the postfeminist situation today. In fact, the postfeminist cannot genuinely subscribe to a notion of post-equality, post-feminism, to do so contradicts the power the postfeminist has arrogated: “Feminist demands uncover the truth that capitalist patriarchal society cannot deliver on its ‘liberal’ promises of equality or even equal rights for women without destabilising itself” (Eisenstein as qtd. in Coppock, Haydon and Richter 177).

This re-emphasizes that postfeminism is a product produced by and for capitalist patriarchies. The movement operates on a false semblance of equality – post-equality— by fallaciously upholding the lives of individual women while disguising that its existence depends upon the structural subordination of women as a collective.

To recapitulate the material covered in Chapter Two, Irigaray does not endorse an equality whereby women are merely inserted into traditional men’s roles; this kind of equality only keeps women as competitive rivals and commodities in a capitalist system. Rather, Irigaray identifies the need for a radical transformation of the economy and by extension patriarchy itself. Arguably, the economy is a mode of patriarchy. Though Irigaray only names men as the perpetrators of a masculine economy, in a postfeminist era this must include women. Moreover, women are extending this logic of objectification to men and in the process are redefining men’s roles in sexuality (as will be shown through specific examples in the writing which follows). Suffice to say for now, however, that both Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s philosophies fundamentally challenge the very terms of hierarchal exchange based on sexual difference, the ownership of bodies, and the competition of buying and selling human beings associated with postfeminism.

Beauvoir and Irigaray insist on a renewed civility between the sexes. As the previous chapter alluded to, Beauvoir favours women casting off the entrapments and “the defects of

56 femininity” (161), and realizing that social norms prescribed for women in patriarchal societies are constructions not absolutes. If feminine traits are accepted as universal truths then patriarchy can uphold inequalities according to sexual difference as normative and “natural.” Recognizing the existentialist position is imperative because “the sexually different body – is a fundamental human situation” (Moi, What is a Woman? 111-12). Thus, Beauvoir rejects sex-based oppression, and while Toril Moi maintains that Beauvoir upholds traditional masculine attributes as superior to feminine traits (thereby reifying patriarchal norms), this cannot, according to Beauvoir’s philosophy, be the case, even if she does explicitly state it. If feminine norms are constructs, so too are masculine ones, and if feminine norms have no real correspondence to women (I hesitate to say female bodies), then masculine norms have no real correspondence to men. In an ideal situation, according to Beauvoir’s logic, men and women would experience a wide spectrum of ways of being, partaking in both masculinity and femininity, and ultimately rendering those terms irrelevant and unintelligible for understanding sexual difference.46 A post masculinity/femininity society enables not only women to experience transcendence more fully but also men, and it would seemingly represent the reciprocity and ethical equality between the sexes to which Beauvoir subscribes.

In order for this to take shape, patriarchal notions of femininity and masculinity must be rejected. Though Beauvoir concentrates mostly on the feminine, giving her critics just reason to argue she does not dismantle the masculine qua universal project but rather valorizes it, it is necessary for her anti-sex-oppression project that both terms and norms be radically transformed.

Employing Platonic rhetoric, Beauvoir rejects the myth of the Eternal Feminine as precisely that, a myth. The lived experiences of women indicate that biology is not destiny and femininity is an

46 One might also suggest that this constitutes androgyny, i.e., Carolyn G. Heilbrun in Toward A Recognition of Androgyny (1973). 57 artificial, social construct, which no woman can actually correspond with – in Irigarayan terms she overflows the container – and, therefore, cannot be used as justification for women’s subjugation.

Endeavouring to provide a genealogy for how the feminine came to represent women and their subjugation, Beauvoir returns to Engels’ account in The Origins of the Family. She rejects

Engels’ explanation, which ascribes woman’s enslavement to the inauguration of private property

(which has clear ties to technological inventions). Early human societies, Engels argues enacted sexual divisions of labour but the divisions were non-hierarchal. Engels surmises that it is access to new tools that leads to new modes of activity and hierarchies: “intensive labor is needed to clear the fields and cultivate the fields. So man has recourse to other men, reducing them to slavery.

Private property appears: master of slaves and land, man also becomes proprietor of the woman”

(Beauvoir 63). The advancement of technology, and the supposition that woman is physically not as capable of partaking in these labourious activities, expands man’s power and productivity while reducing woman’s productivity and power: it pushes her further into the world of reproductivity or facticity as Beauvoir would call it (446).

For Engels, this explains why the division of sexual labour in which the sexes were previously more or less equal becomes hierarchal. It is not until the Industrial Revolution that Marx and Engels anticipate a rupture in the sexual hierarchy is at hand. The introduction of machines reduces the male worker’s monopoly in the workforce because women and children can replace them as cheaper labor. Woman’s re-entry into productive labour (although of course if she is a proletariat, there is little joy in this work), means she may have recourse to her own income, putting her on a more even playing field with her male counterpart. Engels deduces that in modern day capitalist societies if the rise of the wife “over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, [then] the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been

58 inhuman too” (qtd. in Jones, Communist Manifesto 267). According to these terms, I read Marx and Engels as sanctioning postfeminism, at least in economic terms. There is even an emphasis on seriously minimizing woman’s role in domesticity, assuming that reproductive labor does not constitute productive labor, which is of course a highly contentious claim (Benhabib and Cornell

2-4). However, this is where the similarities end, for Engels and Marx were vehemently opposed to the capitalist system and its false promise of liberation, and, therefore, highly critical of private property. Instead they argue that such an economic system is oppressive: it alienates workers from productivity, from products of labour, from each other, and from themselves.47

Yet, Beauvoir counters that the invention of private property alone cannot explain why the relationship between the sexes became one of superiority and inferiority. To reiterate, abolishing private property for Engels is necessary if woman is to be equal to man because he identifies the subordination of woman to man in terms of private property. She is property. The rise of the modern family legally supports this belief, and Engels writes that society must destroy “the twin foundations of hitherto existing marriage – the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents” (qtd. in Jones, Communist, 67). Economic equality between the sexes is the solution as not only Marx and Engels conceive it but also as postfeminism perceives it. The former favours a socialist society, the latter a capitalist society. The problem as Beauvoir sees it is that neither system radically alters patriarchy: both are in fact economic modes of patriarchy.

Within and across different economic systems, patriarchal expectations contain woman.

Beauvoir argues that woman’s status as “an erotic object” (Beauvoir 67) plays an important role in her subordination. In her section “The Married Woman,” Beauvoir writes that “Society has

47 See Marx and Engels’ references to fulfilling one’s vocation via productive labour in The Communist Manifesto. 59 always been male; political power has always been in the hands of men... For the male it is always another male who is the fellow being, the other who is also the same, with whom reciprocal relations are established” (102). Marriage is not a union between equal partners, argues Beauvoir, referencing Claude Levi-Strauss: it occurs “not as a bond between men and women, but between men and men by means of women” (103). Transitioning from the world of her father and/or brothers, the married woman is cut off from her maternal kin, which in part explains why, unlike other oppressed minority groups, women have not bonded together and formed a collective consciousness (Beauvoir 19). Accepting Marx and Engels’ premise, Beauvoir believes reproduction and domestic labor lock her in dependence and immanence (Lundgren-Gothlin 98-

99), while man “is socially an independent and complete individual; he is regarded first of all as a producer whose existence is justified by the work he does for the group” (446). But the notion that work alone, productive labor will free woman is erroneous.

The historical materialist vision of woman and man qua worker is utopic: Beauvoir writes,

“How impossible it is to consider the woman as a solely productive force: for man, she is a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object, an Other through whom he seeks himself” (67). Economy alone cannot account for the asymmetrical relations between the sexes. Thinking back to my earlier example of Holly Madison and Playboy, with its continuous stream of models, it is easy to see how in a postfeminist, capitalist culture this asymmetry is embraced, replicated, and commodified.

As McRobbie notes, “The phallic girl is epitomized in the so-called glamour model, who earns most of her money posing naked for the soft-porn pages of the press and magazines and who, if successful, will also launch herself as a brand, lending her name and image to various products, usually ranges of underwear, make up, perfume or other fashion items” (84). Paradoxically, each

Playboy model sells herself/is packaged as beautiful, independent, and empowered, the suggestion

60 is that all three necessarily stem from her pro-sex attitude and that she is in charge of her sex stance.

Martha C. Nussbaum claims that Playboy is not only about the woman as object of sexual pleasure, including postfeminist declarations that the model is in some part a desiring subject, but it is also about what she represents in terms of economic hierarchies and social status lived out in competition between men and male desire.

The magazine is all about the competition of men with other men, and its message is the

availability of a readily renewable supply of more or less fungible women to men who have

achieved a certain level of prestige and money – or rather, that fantasy women of this sort

are available, through the magazine, to those who can fantasize that they have achieved

this status. (285)

An ironic characteristic of postfeminism is “ruthless female individualism” (McRobbie as qtd. in

Genz and Brabon 169) because the model, like all commodities, is, and must be, replaceable. Her value as an erotic object or status symbol, as Marx would put it, stems from an imagined use-value, exchange value, and an imagined relation to other commodities. She is an imagined commodity.

When this link is broken or lost, she, alienated value, is replaced.

Contra Engels’ and Beauvoir’s discussion of technology as a possible explanation for the sexual hierarchy, Irigaray theorizes the exchange of women between men as manifesting the incest taboo – meaning fathers and sons must have non-familial women to reproduce with, thus facilitating trade amongst other men.48 The exchange of women between men nevertheless constitutes a monopoly. A man controls the exclusive rights to the commodity with the power to manipulate and negotiate prices and terms of sale. The “ho(m)mo-sexual monopoly” functions

48 Margaret Whitford writes that “Irigaray puts forward the idea which is the cornerstone of her work: that western culture is founded not on parricide (as Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo), but on matricide” (25). 61 according only to one sex’s desires and demands – men’s. She argues that “the law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men. Passage from nature to culture is hommosexualitie. Not in immediate practice but social. Societies function in mode of semblance. It is played out through the bodies of women” (“Women” 175). When

Irigaray posits that the role of men in exchanging women seemingly excludes woman from this role, this is not necessarily the case. Women need not be excluded per se from being exchangers if they likewise exchange women according to male desires/needs. If women remain commodities, a role man does not instantiate, then a masculine economy can operate successfully and our capitalist postfeminist era is living proof.

Mimesis and Femininity

Irigaray writes that “the exchange of women as goods accompanies and stimulates exchanges of other ‘wealth’ among groups of men” (“Women” 175). Marx never equates the exchange of women as commodities per se with wealth, but he does suggest that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’” (Capital 125). Therefore, in countering patriarchal, capitalist economies, Irigaray stresses that civility re-establishes a respect for sexual difference and correlates to different “civil rights and duties for men and women […] the question of respect between the sexes, of an equitable identity for each sex, is always bound up with problems of money, or at least with the preference for ownership of property over respect for persons” (Thinking the Difference 72). According to

Irigaray, patriarchy functions on the lack of civility by men because men are more concerned with wealth, wealth earned from the commodification of women (Thinking 73). However, as I have been arguing throughout this work, women, in their imitations of men and equality to men in terms of civil rights, simultaneously now promote a lack of civility against both women and men. It is

62 the latter discussion of women commodifying men which marks the most recent instantiation of postfeminism and as such broadens contemporary scholarship.

Mimesis is one strategy women can employ in exposing patriarchal hierarchies, according to Irigaray; stylistically, (textually – and the textual is political) mimesis dis/uncovers the suppression/oppression of the feminine in the western philosophical tradition. In her early works in particular, Irigaray’s mimetic style challenges the canon for its denigration of the feminine (to the point that the maternal/feminine is non-representable), its privileging of the masculine, and its binary thinking which places the terms in oppositional and hierarchical positions. Like Beauvoir’s adherence to existentialism, which offers no metaphysical alternatives to the world in which we inhabit (Ethics 16), Irigaray’s mimesis cannot necessarily radically transform patriarchal hierarchies, but it can perhaps at least indicate their presence.

While Irigaray does not think we can exit western metaphysics or the constructions and baggage of sexual difference in western culture, she nevertheless stakes a claim for the maternal in the philosophical tradition and suggests a femininity beyond the patriarchal binary masculine/feminine. For this reason her work and her mimetic style has been charged with essentializing women (e.g., Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 139). Because women are so ensnared in conceptions of the feminine, Irigaray questions whether or not is it is possible to break out of them.

The most we can do, she intimates, is push the boundaries from within. Therefore, Irigaray writes that “there is, an initial phase, perhaps only one ‘path,’ the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it […] To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it” (This Sex Which is Not One 76). Mimesis for

Irigaray is the act of purposeful miming, “transforming woman’s masquerade, her so-called femininity into a means of reappropriating the feminine” (Schor 66). That women “choose” to take up the feminine role as dictated by patriarchy suggests that the phallogocentric order49 is not ahistoric.

Mimesis is “a parodic mode of discourse designed to deconstruct the discourse of misogyny through effects of amplification and rearticulation” (Schor 67): mimicry exposes the subject as a fraud, de-authorizing that which is believed to be the authority in identity construction and the production of knowledge – furthermore, it suggests, as Naomi Schor claims, a positive mimesis.

A positive mimesis does more than undercut the phallocentric order, it is “a joyful reappropriation” of difference and “the emergence of the feminine…from within or beneath…femininity, within which it lies buried” (67). Schor suggests that Irigaray avoids re-essentializing woman by committing herself to the deconstructionist project but with the difference that she reaffirms a feminine identity beyond the dissolution of binaries. At the same time, Irigaray does not stabilize or solidify the feminine, the feminine is fluid. Considering her comments on fluids in works like

This Sex Which is Not One supports Schor’s notion that “Irigaray characterizes both women’s writing and speech as fluid – once again, miming the derogatory stance of abandoning fluids to the feminine in Western culture” (68). An articulation of femme-parlans or écriture féminine is thus crucial to asserting female subjectivity.

Contending that Irigaray’s concept of mimesis has political potential, Rosi Braidotti writes that the strategy

amounts to a collective repossession by women of the images and representations of

‘Woman’ as they have been coded in language, culture, science, knowledge, and discourse

49 This term is used often by Irigaray; for simplicity, I use it interchangeably with patriarchy and masculine economy, although I am aware that the term stems from psychoanalysis. 64

and consequently internalized in the heart, mind, body, and lived experience of women.

Mimetic repetition as textual and political strategy is the active subversion of established

modes of the representation and expression of women’s experience. (121)

The problem as I see it is that mimesis has not realized its envisioned potential; rather than subverting femininity through parody, mimesis has been hijacked as a tool for postfeminism, reinforcing that which Irigaray believed it would usurp.

Meanwhile Beauvoir directly refers to mimicry, and never mimesis, only a couple of times in The Second Sex. This mimicry, however, plays an important role in identifying and rejecting patriarchal philosophy, literature, culture, economics, family, etc. She contests representations of woman as the Other (both as visible and as absent) in these traditions. The concept of the Other necessarily takes up the idea of sameness (man, superior) and different (woman, inferior). Woman is the Other because socially and ideologically she is not the same as man. To reiterate, as Beauvoir notes in a patriarchal society, “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the

Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (17). Beauvoir blames mimicry for woman’s subjugation: “confronting man, woman is always play-acting; she lies when she makes believe that she accepts her status as the inessential other, she lies when she presents to him an imaginary personage through mimicry, costumery, studied phrases” (557). Women’s mimicking of the feminine, defined and determined within patriarchal cultures, will not bring about transcendence or autonomy for women, nor, the reciprocity and solidarity between the sexes that Beauvoir upholds as ethically necessary for society.50 Understanding equality in relation to mimicry,

50 Beauvoir refers to this as Mitsein. 65 however, has major philosophical implications for postfeminism, which centralizes sexuality and femininity.

Not capitulating their femininity, (as some, e.g., Moi, What 161, read Beauvoir suggesting women ought, sanguinely upholding masculinity or Irigaray’s ironic copying of patriarchal femininity), means postfeminists take up the role of exchanger, which is determined along masculine axes of power. Postfeminists do this by sanctioning and valorizing the objectification of women. Consider the increase in young women visiting strip clubs and the extreme popularity of the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show which is broadcast over network TV. Perhaps heterosexual men attending male strip clubs and men walking the catwalk in outlandish underwear is the future, albeit postfeminism dictates that men and women do not perceive their actions as objectifying.51 Additionally, postfeminism encourages the objectification of men. Take for instance, the opening of the first Tallywackers in Dallas, Texas. A male version of Hooters – but with better food – Tallywackers features an all-male wait staff who wear booty shorts and loose tank tops. In the promotional material the sexy, young men are shirtless. Just as the capitalist system has not been overturned by the banding together of proletariats, patriarchy has not been ruptured by the collective organization of women. This is despite the fact that woman as exchanger is a false power, a power that turns women against each other, and one whereby the exchanger earns capital gains at the cost/exploitation of another woman or man.

51 While it is not within the scope of this work to complexify objecthood as other than treating a human being as a thing, Martha C. Nussbaum in “Objectification” identifies seven different kinds which complicate any straightforward rendering: “1. Instrumentality: The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes. 2. Denial of autonomy: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination. 3. Inertness: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity. 4. Fungibility: The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types. 5. Violability: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into. 6. Ownership: The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc. 7. Denial of subjectivity: The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.’” (257) 66

Irigaray’s concept of mimesis never intended to advocate a monopoly for women whereby woman would exchange men, neither is she advocating a duopoly/duopsony. A monopoly among women replaces patriarchy with matriarchy; a duopoly stretches the masculine economy to accommodate women as the other controller/exchanger in the market. A duopoly characterizes the capitalist postfeminist market today; the market, its masculine parameters, and the commodification of women, does not change. Like capitalism, postfeminism encourages competition and individualism, and as Irigaray notes, it is committed to traditional femininity – first, consider all the commodities aimed at and marketed toward women: beauty products, fashion, cosmetic surgery, health, food, etc. then, consider that these products are increasingly being marketed to men.

Irigaray traces postfeminist sexuality to patriarchal femininity: “The characteristics of (so- called) feminine sexuality derive from them: the valorisation of reproduction and nursing: faithfulness; modesty, ignorance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men's ‘activity’; seductiveness, in order to arouse the consumers’ desire while offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself” (“Women” 185). Beauvoir too states that woman, as the Other, is also “the sex, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less” (16). According to

Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s thinking, feminine sexuality, a defining characteristic of the postfeminist era, is a sign of the social order of commodities and disguises woman’s innate subjectivity.

Femininity functions as a “masquerade” as does the pleasure woman takes from playing the object of desire: for Irigaray it amounts to “women experiencing desire by experiencing themselves as the objects of masculine desire,” which is highly problematic (Crane 86). Irigaray argues that even if woman denounces her reproductive function and becomes “man’s equal…a

67 potential man” (Irigaray 130), she would still occupy an inferior social position because of her value on the exchange market.

[On] the market of sexual exchange – woman would also have to preserve or maintain

what is called femininity. The value of woman would accrue to her from her maternal role,

and in addition, from her ‘femininity.’ But in fact that ‘femininity’ is a role, an image, a

value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of

femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity. The

fact remains that this masquerade requires an effort on her part for which she is not

compensated. Unless her pleasure comes simply from being chosen as an object of

consumption or of desire by masculine ‘subjects.’ And, moreover, how can she do

otherwise without being ‘out of circulation’? (Irigaray 130-31)

According to this thinking, a postfeminist society affirms images and modes of being for women, determined by male systems, as if they were independent of these systems. Thus postfeminist culture suggests women are not subjugated; they are liberated and empowered. And is it strictly true that the woman does not get any pleasure herself?

An excellent example of postfeminism, which takes into account the sexual economy, mimicry, the phallic girl, and gynosexism, and, therefore, adding complexity to the debate, is a recent music video by Jennifer Lopez. In “I Luh Ya Papi,” Jennifer Lopez “mimics” sexist videos which feature a male performer surrounded by beautiful, scantily-clad women, and whereby the number of women to men is disproportionate. Because “visual culture plays a key role in postfeminist media body representations,” Lopez postures herself at the center of the screen and unapologetically surrounds herself with beautiful, semi-naked men (Jackson and Vares 351). One of Lopez’s back-up female performers justifies the men’s inclusion by asking: “Why do men

68 always objectify the women in every single video. Like why can’t we for once objectify the men?”

(Lopez). The men are mimicking the stereotypical role of women and the gender-theory-informed viewer knows this. Meanwhile, Lopez is more than the performer; she too is a sex object – and so this is where the analogy or symmetry is disrupted.

Traditional videos which feature male musicians or singers often do not explicitly objectify them sexually (though of course there are counters to this point e.g., One Direction, Enrique

Iglesias, Drake, and so on), while the opposite is true for female performers. Similarly, it seems that even when men are objectified it does not undermine or threaten their social or political power.

Contrary to what one might expect, Ann J. Cahill notes, when comparing men’s objectification with women’s, “the sexual objectification of male bod[y] by the female gaze can serve to re- establish a powerful masculinity [and] indicates that mere reversal is not as liberatory, or not as equally liberatory, as might have been hoped” (71). Rather than dismantling hegemonic masculinity which objectifies women, unwittingly Lopez’s video, by positioning men for the female gaze, reifies the objectification of women.

By placing Lopez as an alleged object of desire and a desiring subject, the video in many ways encapsulates the postfeminist paradigm. Postfeminist rhetoric insists says there is pleasure in being an object – look at Lopez, branded J. Lo, (or at least the cultural production and representation of Lopez). Look at the men in the video with her. Everyone is having a good time.

Jaggar speculates that “treating women differently from men …reinforces sexual stereotypes” such as women as sexual prey for men who are sexual aggressors (“Sexual Difference” 21). In some sense then Lopez’s video may do important work in deconstructing “this cultural myth [which] serves as an implicit legitimation for the prostitution, sexual harassment, and rape of women, because it implies that such activities are in some sense natural” (Jaggar, “Sexual Difference” 22).

But, as Cahill’s research implies, gynosexism is at best a pseudo-feminism. Endorsed in the name of sexual equality and postfeminism, gynosexism reinforces the misogyny which it seeks to usurp, and is unsuitable as a feminist strategy both politically and ethically.

Another problem with postfeminism, garnered from Beauvoir and Irigaray, is with the sexual economy and its denigration of the feminine: “Feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations” in the phallocratic economy; “And so what is mostly strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure” (Irigaray, Irigaray 125). Irigaray maintains that

Lopez is in fact experiencing a female sexuality denied: “the role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed by this masculine specula(riz)ation and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt” (This Sex Which Is Not One 30). For

Breanne Fahs this indicates a disconnect between men’s perceptions of women’s own understanding of their desire, to the extent that she argues: “Necessary to the commodification process, woman cannot ‘have’ her own desire, while man ‘has’ his own desire” (185). Woman, alienated from her own desires, must conform and mimic the status of desired object instead. Thus,

“in essence she can only experience desire to the extent that she submits to her own objectification”

(Fahs 185). Within postfeminism, women have not left the patriarchal economy. The dichotomizing logic of sameness and difference remains unaltered: it is driven by a sexual economy that thrives on capitalist consumption and denying feminine pleasure. That powerful feminine space, to which Irigaray attaches so much promise remains unrealized.

To conclude, though differing in their approaches – Beauvoir suggests women must break and contest correlations of women with femininity so that she is no longer the Other, and the sexes are made equal, while for Irigaray it means women must deliberately mimic the feminine so as to

70 locate and recuperate a non-patriarchal feminine – Beauvoir and Irigaray agree that in the Western cultural and philosophical tradition, woman embodies and mimics the role of object in relation to man, who is subject. The relationship between object and subject is one of possession and desire.

The object constructs herself in line with feminine norms and expectations so as to arouse desire; the masculine subject desires and possesses. In this situation woman’s desire remains “elsewhere”

(Irigaray This Sex 77); she is alienated from her sexual desire and her subjectivity. Reflecting on the work of Andrea Dworkin, Nussbaum articulates that “the problem derives not from any obtuseness in sexual desire itself, but from the way in which we have been socialized erotically, in a society that is suffused with hierarchy and domination” (268). Economy alone cannot account for women’s social inferiority, these theorists suggest: the sexual hierarchy, defined by patriarchy, precludes women’s full autonomy and subjectivity. Postfeminism is exemplary in this regard.

Postfeminism, in reclaiming women’s desire and sexuality, seeks first to take pleasure from objecthood – posing the question, why is being an object in and of itself a bad thing, and second to stake a space for women as sexual possessors.52 This takes the form, as highlighted in popular culture, of women desiring both women and men as sexual objects. A radical rupturing of patriarchal exchange, however, never occurs: “As a subject he posits the world, and, remaining outside of the universe he posits, he makes himself the lord of it” (Beauvoir 180). The commodification of sexuality, a logic of saming to men’s desire remains intact. Thus, postfeminism offers women a false empowerment, a false feminism, which has no viable

52 Cahill writes that “marginalizing the body from the self leads feminist critiques of objectification to an almost necessary suspicion of things bodily. Yet to be treated as a thing, a body, is not inherently degrading because we are, in fact, bodily things” (25). Adopting the term “derivatization” instead of objectification (and rejecting the relation of Subject-Object, or mind/body dualism), Cahill claims that “women are sexual beings, and sexual bodies, is also unproblematic: indeed, as a site of embodied interaction, sexuality should have the potential to enhance, not diminish, a flourishing sense of the material, intersubjective self. It is when women are treated as pale imitations of a better being that ethical harms are perpetrated” (55). She further adds “that men can be sexually objectified, but are rarely sexually derivatized, clarifies the power differential that remains woven throughout constructed sexual roles and norms (83). 71 alternative to the continuation of commodifying, of consuming, and of disciplining women’s and men’s bodies.

CONCLUSION: FEMINIST ALTERNATIVES

This thesis in contemporary feminist philosophy has provided a sustained overview of postfeminism within popular culture and offered analyses and critiques of the two concepts most important to the movement – equality and sexuality – by engaging the works of Simone de

Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Throughout this work, I have maintained that postfeminism and its insistence on commodification, consumerism, empowerment, and individuality is highly problematic for feminist philosophy. The implications of this movement are such that women remain inscribed in the patriarchal system. Postfeminism functions as an effective guise which makes its adherents proclaim feminism is dead and pretend that society really is post-sexism. Yet, a careful analysis of equality and sexuality shows that this is a false premise, and that postfeminists simply re-subscribe to an oppressive system which keeps women in a subordinate position

(societal, political, economic, and cultural). As the chapters demonstrate, examples from popular culture supporting this claim abound, but, moreover, the inclusion of men as sexual objects is the latest phase of this movement, making one conclude that postfeminism is an inevitable corollary of the capitalist, patriarchal system.

A return to Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s feminist philosophies on equality and sexual difference affirms such thinking. Both theorists indicate that understanding and contesting today’s postfeminism is paramount. Despite, each writer offering a specific account of how this might come about (to reiterate, Beauvoir is an egalitarian feminist and Irigaray upholds sexual difference), postfeminism has remained surprisingly resilient to such criticisms, as is evident in its presence in contemporary popular culture. Beauvoir’s call for women to reject the stereotype of femininity and all its entrapments has in fact been largely rejected. Postfeminist idealizations of beauty thrive on and magnify the hyperfeminine. Meanwhile, Irigaray’s focus on mimesis has not

73 undermined patriarchal femininity either, partly because it did not fully take into consideration the sexual desire of women to be exchangers while simultaneously remaining the exchanged, e.g.,

Lopez as sexually attractive subject-object. Coppock, Haydon, and Richter argue that “the two dimensions of [the] women’s struggle, equality and difference, need to be reunited” (185) in order for meaningful feminist change to occur; this study reflects their claim by studying Beauvoir’s and

Irigaray’s philosophies as a means for contesting postfeminism.

This project, however, does not claim to offer a definitive guide to ending the popularity or the perpetuation of postfeminism in popular culture, but it does offer examples where cracks and slippages in the mechanism can be identified. Poignant examples, include anti-‘Page 3 Girl’ campaigns and protests in Britain which work in tandem: anti-‘Page 3 Girl’ campaigns,53 happen online e.g., on Twitter @NoMorePage3 and offline outside the Sun headquarters in London. The

Dear Kate Team is another instance of a feminist campaign featuring a diverse array of women parodying and subverting an ad by Victoria’s Secret called “Perfect Body.” The original ad, which features thin, tall, attractive, young models wearing bras, was called out for body-shaming and projecting unrealistic body images for women. This pushback, not up, is a promising example of the power of social media for feminist philosophy, whereby “women/girls use their bodies as political tools to gain empowerment, within the parameters of a capitalist economy” (Genz and

Brabon 175). In Chapter One, I mentioned the film Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon because the protagonist, Cheryl Strayed, turns her back on a life of commodities and emotional emptiness by reconnecting with the poetry of Adrienne Rich, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, and remembering her late mother. The film critiques the postfeminist world by centralizing likeable,

53 The Page 3 Girl is a daily featuring of a topless young woman, and there is no male equivalent in the newspaper. The postfeminist argument in favour of sexual equality suggests there must be a topless man, maybe even a bottomless man. 74 strong women in the form of a mother-daughter duo. Like the backlash against the Sun’s Page 3 and the Perfect Body ad from Victoria’s Secret, the film provides an alternative to the postfeminist world, signalling that the postfeminist position is dominant but it is also highly fragile and insecure.

Wild is the best example of an anti-postfeminist stance, and my discussion of the film ends this thesis primarily because Strayed’s character fosters a progressive combination of both

Beauvoir’s and Irigaray’s philosophies. On the one hand, she fulfills Beauvoir’s requirements by projecting herself into the world by hiking alone. As the film notes very few women ever attempt this hike, and stereotypes about femininity are quickly quashed as she suffers through extreme conditions, without cool clothes, makeup, or concern for her physical appearance. She comes through the hike a more confident and self-assured person. On the other hand, as Irigaray suggests, she fosters a maternal genealogy through feminist poetry, memories of her mother, and later finding love with a partner and children.

The film supports Irigaray’s belief that women can attain subjectivity through recuperating a maternal genealogy and affirming the relationship between mother and daughter.

If we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, …[one must] assert that there

is a genealogy of women. There is a genealogy of women within our family: on our

mother’s side we have mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and daughters.

Given our exile in the family of the father-husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of

women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this

female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity. (Irigaray, Irigaray 44)

There must be contiguity between the mother and daughter, and Irigaray writes that in a maternal genealogy “women must love one another as mothers, with a maternal love, and as daughters, with a filial love” (Ethics of Sexual Difference 89). If woman is to be a desiring subject too, “the central

75 condition would be a maternal genealogy, so that the daughter could situate herself in her identity with respect to her mother. The maternal should have a spiritual and divine dimension, and not be relegated merely to the carnal” (Whitford 159). Strayed’s character creates this genealogy as she remembers her mother, who died from cancer. On her journey, Strayed has flashbacks to encounters between she and her mother, and while remembering her caustic comments and volatile actions towards her mother, essentially treating her mother as an enemy, she realizes that she has been an “accomplice in the murder of the mother” (Irigaray, Irigaray 44). Strayed rejects her former self and the postfeminist world, which encourages the forgetting and denial of the maternal, she once inhabited. Postfeminism is pushed to the background of the film as an undesirable, destructive, and alienating moral, social space.

The promise of commodification, including commodifying one’s self and others, in addition to purchasing commodities is not a path towards so-called freedom and empowerment – as Beauvoir and Irigaray both emphasize. A non-feminine, maternal genealogy can offer an alternative to postfeminist popular culture. This is to say that political resistance against postfeminism is possible (especially considering easy access to social media) when women are no longer reduced to femininity (defined in opposition and in relation as inferior to masculinity).

Similarly, as Irigaray cautioned, when reading Beauvoir’s work, one cannot uphold the masculine as par excellence. A critique of masculine ideology is necessary if we do not want women mimicking men as a means for achieving false power: I gesture here towards a post-masculine and post-feminine society, given the destructive connotations and tendencies of each in a postfeminist, capitalist, patriarchal society.

Feminist resistance against postfeminism, and the capitalist system from which the phallic girl and gynosexism emerges from and depends upon, can happen in several ways in popular

76 culture: 1) parodying the overt sexualisation of young women and girls and the lack of diversity when it comes to representing women in media; 2) using social media as a feminist political tool to raise awareness and a collective consciousness. This means refusing to employ the terms

“empowerment” and “choice,” as determined in postfeminist, individualistic discourse as substitutes for feminism (Anderson 3). This might take the form of transnational feminist organizations addressing issues like sweatshop labour (understanding who makes the products you purchase and under what conditions, wages, etc.) or human trafficking. Western postfeminists play a large part in both of these issues because they promote the notion that because the western world is post-sexism, and they, as women, “choose” to be “sexual objects” (Anderson 2) and work in the sex industry, all women have a choice. This implicitly suggests that working against human trafficking or neo-slavery is pointless; 3) jamming the capitalist system by refusing to purchase magazines, items, or brands which sexually commodify girls and women (i.e., not buying one’s self or one’s daughter a Playboy pencil case or a baby onesie that reads MILF); 4) refusing to be the “token achiever – who affirms female oppression while neutralising that affirmation in an individualistic rhetoric” or the “traitor to the feminist cause, guiltily standing over ‘the corpse of feminism’” (Genz and Brabon 168); and 5) fostering an ethics of respect for sexual difference and reciprocity between the sexes by encouraging non-competitive relationships between young women and girls, daughters and mothers, both of which are dependent upon a refusal to commodify oneself or others according to the phallic tropes of femininity and masculinity.

If we agree that the masculine/feminine are no longer adequate designations, does this also entail that sexual difference is irrelevant? No, because Irigaray argues that a feminine beyond and/or outside of patriarchal discourse is not impossible. Creating a maternal genealogy and speaking, writing, giving shape to a feminine which has been suppressed in the patriarchal

77 philosophical tradition is necessary for ethical, reciprocal relations between the sexes. Beauvoir, too, underscores a rejection of gendered/sexed binaries as part of the existential project toward friendship, equity, and reconciliation between humans. Rather than glamorizing or glorifying the postfeminist stance, it is important to nurture non-feminine sexual difference as a viable alternative, one which holds postfeminism and the capitalist economy accountable as disillusioning and destructive not just for one’s self, or for women, but for society as a whole.

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