Is there anything “toxic” about femininity? The rigid femininities that keep us locked in

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been rising popular discourse around ‘toxic masculinity’, and the problems of a hegemonic gender structure that facilitates male violence and misogyny. In the public debate over whether toxic masculinity is fact or fiction, ‘toxic femininity’ is often raised by men’s rights activists and others as an anti-feminist retort, to suggest that women can be ‘toxic’ too. This paper provides a sketch of how the term has been used so far, in tandem with an overview of the limitations of the more extensively discussed idea of ‘toxic masculinity’. This paper suggests that rather than deploying ‘toxic femininity’, it is more useful to consider what might be ‘toxic’ about some approaches to femininity. Drawing on existing theories of femininity, including emphasised, hegemonic, normative, patriarchal femininity, pariah femininities, and femmephobia, this paper offers the notion of ‘rigid femininities’ to explain the structures that keep us locked into a ‘toxic’ gender system. This paper utilises the term toxic femininity as a jumping-off point for theorising femininity broadly. In theorising femininity, this paper offers a conceptualisation of the ‘toxic’ attachments that reinforce the gendered power structure/essentialized gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Toxic femininity
• hegemonic femininity
• emphasised femininity
• normative femininity
• patriarchal femininity
• rigid femininities

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Hannah McCann

Dr Hannah McCann is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research sits within critical femininity studies and explores femme identity, beauty culture, and queer fandom. She has published in several feminist and queer theory journals including the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Sexualities. Her first monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018, and her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures was published in 2020 through Red Globe Press.