ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to feminist work from Caitlin Moran and Jessica Valenti to examine how a different approach to feminist politics, without a critique of feminine embodiment, may be possible. While there are also issues to be taken up with Moran and Valenti’s approaches, this chapter aims to explore how their perspectives can be useful for rethinking feminism’s orientation toward femininity without simply reducing a defence of femininity to “choice”. Namely, these authors make a case for enjoying femininity, while not focusing on feminine embodiment as the key to politics: femininity can be both empowering and disempowering, but it ought not to be the locus of our political orientation. Here there is emphasis on the pleasure, joy, and astonishment of femininity, as well as the pain and suffering that comes from the enforcement of broader social expectations around gender. While these authors have been critiqued for their own emphasis on “choice” that easily fits within a dominant neoliberal rhetoric of individualism, this chapter explores the possibility of understanding Moran’s and Valenti’s offerings from a slightly different perspective that does not rely on “choice” alone. In this way this chapter does not endorse the “choice feminist” model, but rather presents a way of understanding how the relationship between femininity and feminism might be understood in a more dynamic way.
