Femme interventions and the proper feminist subject: Critical approaches to decolonizing western feminist pedagogies

Abstract

As it currently stands, little academic attention has been paid to the systematic devaluation of femininity or femmephobia. By adopting “femme” as a critical analytic, this paper dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are perpetuated within Contemporary Western Feminist (CWF) theory. This perpetuation is propped up by the thematic marginalization of empowered femininities from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities that maintains femininity as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. The excavation of an empowered feminine subject from the margins reveals the foothold of normative whiteness embedded within feminist pedagogies. Using a thematic analysis of how femininity is taken-up within textbooks used in gender studies courses, the current paper demonstrates how intersections of femininity have yet to be addressed within dominant Feminist theories. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of (re)thinking through the limitations of CWF theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme.

Keywords:

• femme
• feminist pedagogies
• feminist theory
• femmephobia
• femininity
• whiteness

Public Interest Statement

Nearly every university in Canada offers either a Women’s/Gender Studies degree, or at least some programming within this field of study. One of the goals of Women’s & Gender studies is to understand the multiple dimensions of social inequality. The current paper examines how one of these intersections has been largely overlooked in Canadian Women’s Studies curricula: femininity and feminine expressions. An overview and analysis of feminist anthologies used to teach undergraduate Feminist Theory courses at Canadian institutions from 2010-2011 demonstrates how the failure to recognize the complexity of femininities maintains a normative feminist subject at the core of feminist thought.

Additional information

Funding

Funding. The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Rhea Ashley Hoskin

Rhea Ashley Hoskin is a SSHRC-CGS doctoral candidate at Queen’s University in the Department of Sociology. Rhea’s research applies an intersectional lens to the topics of femme theory, femme identity, gender identity, social determinants of health and feminist theory.