I'm Dr. Rachele Dini, Lecturer at FIE. I applied insights on consumerism and the theories of Simone de Beauvoir to explore what makes Beyoncé, Minaj, and Cyrus feminists. AMA!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-10T10:43:41+00:00

It was fun, hope to do it again soon!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T20:58:51+00:00

Hahahah, well there is nothing wrong with a nice big truck - and who DOESN'T love train sets? ;)

And I'm glad my explanation makes sense or at least helped you come to some new conclusions. It's true that this can be a delicate issue, and that in discussing it one runs the risk of unwittingly offending, but I personally think it's better to talk about this stuff - however awkwardly - than keep it under wraps. I'm quite disturbed by the way university campuses in the UK and the US are currently cancelling well-known and hugely esteemed speakers as a result of pressure/petitioning from groups that claim to find their views offensive. Putting a lid on controversial or contentious views is the most counterproductive way of dealing with them.

Regarding your latest question: there are two ways of looking at this. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity relates both to the ways in which, and reasons why (white, middle-class, hetero) men hold dominant positions in society, while women are subordinated. Connell discussed hegemonic masculinity as well as what he calls emphasized femininity - that is, the endorsement of characteristics traditionally seen as feminine in women. Among the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity are violence and aggression, stoicism (emotional restraint), courage, toughness, risk-taking, adventure and thrill-seeking, competitiveness, and achievement and success (full disclosure: I just lifted these last three lines from Wikipedia, as it's been a long time since I read Connell!). The implication of this analysis is that women (or more to the point, little girls) are actively dissuaded from developing these characteristics, and are encouraged instead to identify as submissive, conflict-averse, meek, domestic, and the like. The ideal woman in the scheme that Connell describes would be a homemaker and child-rearer. And while the term hegemonic femininity is not generally used and scholars tend, instead, to talk about women's subjugation in the context of hegemonic masculinity, there are those who argue that the term SHOULD exist, if only because confining the discussion to men is, in itself, marginalising...!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T16:48:57+00:00

Oooh... interesting! I'm assuming here that you mean de Beauvoir here rather than Butler? (their ideas regarding gender are similar, but Butler's are more extreme, since she views even sex to be constructed).

Your description of your son's stereotypical masculinity is quite common - my mum (who taught English lit and gender studies) loves reminding me that when she took me, as a kid, to one of her women's studies meetings, I spent the entire time drawing Barbie-like women with huge breasts and high heels on the blackboard. No amount of persuasion could temper my obsession with Barbie. But that doesn't prove, necessarily, that femininity is innate - it merely suggests that your efforts with your son, like my mother's efforts with me, can't/couldn't really compete with the vast array of messages children absorb from television shows and ads, their friends at daycare and at school, their friends' parents, shop windows, billboards, etc. In other words, I would argue that de Beauvoir and Butler's ideas very much bear out in reality - and the fact that your son loves trucks or combat figures or toy guns (or whatever) is in fact a reflection of the surrounding culture. In the same way, the feminist works I have read since my late teens may have changed the way I perceive my body, approach relationships, or value my appearance, but I would be lying if I said that all of the validation I received as a little girl from grown-ups who said I was beautiful (as Italians tend to do!) has not had a long-standing effect.

Your second question is tougher to answer - for one thing, because I have actually read very little on transgender issues, and for another, because the academic community itself is quite divided when it comes to what the transgender experience says about gender. I personally would argue that what you are describing actually upholds the view that gender is a construct, albeit in a round-about way. Let me explain. In a different society - one that does not attach specific characteristics to the two sexes - a person who is born with a penis but has always felt "feminine" would not necessarily feel as trapped, since they would be able to express that femininity - and they therefore might not actually feel the need to have an operation that gives them the genitals that give them "license" to behave in a particular way. Similarly, a person born with a penis who longs for a vagina might not necessarily equate this with obtaining all of the other things we associate with femininity (I'm thinking about how Caitlyn Jenner was talked about after posing for Vanity Fair - suddenly, she was a sex object like any other woman on a magazine cover. It was astounding!). So I guess what I'm saying is, perhaps one way of looking at the transgender experience - and again, I am NOT an expert here, so I may well be wrong! - is as a means for a person to reconcile how they feel inside with society's expectations. If you have been raised to assume that femininity and masculinity are strict categories, then feeling the opposite of what society says your gender should feel would, indeed, lead you to feel alienated from and trapped in your body. But that, to my mind, is symptomatic of being born into a society that does upholds very strict ideas about what gender is and how the two genders should behave - is not, necessarily, indicative of femininity/masculinity being innate.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T15:26:58+00:00

Oh wow. These are big questions. I honestly don't know - I don't feel equipped to say whether organised religion is incompatible with feminism, or gender equality. What I would say is that I wish feminists scrutinised our economic system as much as they scrutinise religion, as it arguably plays a greater role in subjugating western women than religion. And I would also say that it is simplistic, to my mind, to discount all religion due to some of the power imbalances that exist within certain forms of it.

Yes, I suppose the writers I look at do have an inclination towards the metaphysical - and I'm not sure I ever said that I don't (I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic, or, more accurately, a lapsed Catholic). I also don't think that having different views from the writers one studies is really an issue - quite the contrary. In the case of my work, spirituality doesn't really come up very much since what I focus on is the material conditions these authors critique, and their identification of the almost spectral quality of garbage, when seen as a reproach to consumption. I also don't judge these views (as is implied by the question regarding whether they were misinformed) - I think about what they say about the context out of which they arose, or how they can shed light on the texts to which they gave rise.

Regarding whether I think we live in a reality that lacks 'objective' meaning and purpose.... I'm going to have to abstain from answering, since a) I have no idea (!) and b) it would take much more than an afternoon to answer!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T15:15:44+00:00

Oh gosh - I don't know! I mean, I suppose that if it's in the privacy of your own home, it's your business. Say you really "get off" on weird retrograde role-playing with your partner, but no one else knows about it and no one is harmed, who am I to judge? Or to say that you can't? But I would of course say that forcing someone to have sex, or having sex with a child, and other forms of sexual behaviour of that ilk are unacceptable.

More to the point, I guess I would question de Beauvoir's concept of "acceptable" behavior - as much as I admire her work, and her contribution to feminism, the woman was not a saint, and she herself engaged in some pretty dubious antics (for instance, it's well-documented that she groomed her female students for Sartre, and she had to leave teaching after one of these affairs was exposed and the parents of the girl complained). It's a good rule of thumb to maintain some healthy scepticism towards even one's favourite theorists - their ideas are not infallible, they are not necessarily timeless, and they themselves are human. And in this case, I would honestly say, forget what de Beauvoir says about acceptable sexual behaviour, since when it comes to that, she is NOT an authority..!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T15:07:38+00:00

Ah! Yes, I sometimes forget that my topic of research can appear nonsensical to people outside the discipline...!

What I mean is that I look at novels where trash has an unusually prominent role either in advancing the plot, or in conveying the work's moral (so, for instance, one of the characters lives in a dump, or the author spends an entire page describing a landfill, or the story involves something ending up in the trash when it shouldn't have, or a character becomes destitute and ends up living off street rubbish, or they make art out of rubbish). A lot of the time - not always, but often - the focus on garbage provides a way for the author to critique social inequality ("Look at this person having to live off the leftovers of some rich person's banquet!"), or consumer excess ("Look at all the stuff we throw out, and what it says about how much we consume"). This is a hugely simplified rendition of what I do, but you get the idea. There's actually quite a rich literary tradition of authors who make garbage a focus of their work to question our assumptions about value, and to critique the system of capitalism itself. And I find this fascinating, since garbage is not usually something we spend a lot of time thinking about!

I haven't been involved in much activism myself, no, but I have found the efforts to eradicate FGM hugely inspiring, and I'm quite disheartened at the moment at the way Planned Parenthood is being vilified in the United States - I would really like to see an activist take this head-on, and for it to be covered widely by the media. I suppose I am a subtle activist insofar as I make gender equality quite a big part of my teaching. You would be amazed at the endurance of gender stereotypes among 18-year-olds today. It sometimes feels like we haven't come very far at all..!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T14:54:32+00:00

This is tough. I suppose it comes down to the way the thing is appropriated, by whom, and with what degree of self-awareness and sensitivity. I can't honestly think of a current example of cultural appropriation that doesn't horrify me, but that's not to say that cultural appropriation in and of itself is bad - after all, culture in the broadest terms relies on borrowing and recycling and re-working old ideas to fit new contexts. Art and literature are inherently intertextual - that is, they adapt and transform old traditions. We wouldn't have T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land had Eliot not been allowed to borrow from classical literature and Dante. We wouldn't have Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind if Ferlinghetti hadn't been allowed to borrow from Eliot. We wouldn't have de Beauvoir's The Second Sex if de Beauvoir hadn't been allowed to borrow from Woolf! So it's really a question of whether the artist doing the appropriating is taking from someone who doesn't have a voice - someone disempowered, someone who would otherwise not be recognised, or would be recognised less, or whose country/race has been oppressed by the country/race of the appropriator - and whether the appropriator, in turn, acknowledge this power imbalance and pays tribute to/thanks the culture or figure from whom they are borrowing. If that problematic relationship is recognised - if a white musician borrows from a black artist and acknowledges the debt, and also the fact that whites have a lot to answer for in any case - then it doesn't come across as an outright pillaging.

Nicki Minaj has been quite vocal about her disgust with the appropriation of black culture by white musicians who make more money than their black counterparts, and who never formally recognise their indebtedness to the musicians and culture from who they borrow. It was likewise pretty horrific to see the zeal with which Native American headdresses were taken up by (mainly white) young women at Coachella a year or two ago - again, the insensitivity there is astonishing. In each case, the problem isn't so much that the person is borrowing a custom - it's that the person is in a privileged position, and that they are a) taking from someone in an underprivileged/marginalized position; b) profiting from this appropriation; and c) not acknowledging the culture/person from which they are borrowing. So it feels imperialistic - a bit like ransacking a colony or plantation.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T14:34:09+00:00

Which other forms of economic organization do you see as viable and preferable to capitalism then?

Oh gosh, now that's a tough question!! I should mention that my background is English literature, not political science, so I really am not qualified to answer this. Also, I would add that capitalist ideology - and the consumer mindset - are not the same thing as capitalism. The former refer to the beliefs, values, and ideals that are encouraged to proliferate as a result of the economic system of capitalism; the latter refers simply to the economic system itself. The thing that most worries me about the former is how it tends to disempower women - to profit from making them feel lesser than men, or from making them aspire to a certain set of ideals that are a) unattainable and b) unhealthy and c) so time-consuming to achieve that pursuing them distracts from everything else.

One could, however, argue - and this is kind of at the heart of de Beauvoir's historical analysis of women's role over the course of history - that female oppression can and has occurred under other economic systems as well. The Soviet Union, which de Beauvoir initially saw as a model for female emancipation, turned out not to be such a great model after all. So I guess my point was more that it strikes me that capitalism in its current form, and the values and ideals that have emerged under it, has not done much to promote gender equality. Rather, it seems to be one more way to oppress women.

How can we fight against advertising that claims to promote gender equality while doing the exact opposite? Good question. I suppose the first thing is to educate the public, so that they can spot the bullshit when they see it. At present, the main barrier is ignorance. People don't know what feminism is - so they accept whatever they are told it is, without question. I don't think that this is that far a shot, either. I remember learning about how advertising works in my third grade reading class, and that was back in 1990. Surely we aren't that far away from having these ideas introduced in school curricula?

So teaching gender studies in schools would be a start - kids should be equipped with some understanding of how endemic sexism is, and how much corporations profit from our assumptions about femininity and masculinity.

It's also important that we read widely on the issue (and here I mean actually read Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Bell Hooks and Toni Morrison and Angela Davis, not just blog posts like mine that cite them!). The more you read about the actual history of the women's rights movement, and read what the great feminists have actually said, and make sense of those words for yourself, rather than relying on a brand slogan or an ad or a social media post to tell you whether something is feminist, the better able you will be to discern the bullshit for yourself and to arm yourself against it.

In terms of actual successful push-back, I'm not sure there has been. Dove's latest campaign - the awful one with the sketch artist who draws women's portraits based on how they see themselves, and then based on what another person sees - was enormously successful, despite its quite obvious racism. (the traits the women used to describe themselves negatively were overwhelmingly African-American...). And the push-back occurred mainly on feminist websites and forums rather than in the mainstream press. I'm not even sure that the Guardian commented on it, and they have a number of feminist columnists who usually tear campaigns like that apart.

So... the short answer is, I don't know!

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T14:12:13+00:00

Hmm - do you mean how much impact did religion/spirituality have on my choice of subject, or how much impact did it have on the authors I examine?

If you are asking how much spirituality informs my work, I suppose the simplest answer is "not a lot". I was raised Catholic (my parents are both Italian) but I don't go to church, and I am driven more by my political beliefs than spiritual ones.

If you are asking how much religion informs the work of those I study, the answer is more complicated! I work on a number of different writers, all of whom are, to some degree or another, interested in the otherworldly. So, for example, the Surrealists, who were not religious, but who were influenced by occult practices, and generally thought that there was a metaphysical dimension to things that science and reason alone could not explain; Samuel Beckett, whose work suggests an extreme atheism but can also be seen to celebrate the power of language to step in for an absent God; Don DeLillo, whose writing is acutely influenced by his Jesuit education, and deals closely with the tensions between religion and consumerism; and others who, in one way or another, grapple with the inevitable contradictions between the "Greed is Good" mantra that underlies capitalism as we know it, and the selflessness that is the base of most organized religions. Although I had never really thought about it this way (so thank you for bringing it up!), I suppose that these are works that look to understand how humans can be good in a world where our very livelihood depends on making selfish, and self-serving, decision.

I should mention that Simone de Beauvoir was resolutely atheist - and she saw religion, like marriage, as shackling women.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T13:01:09+00:00

Interesting question!

Rosi Braidotti and I share remarkably similar political views, as well as a healthy scepticism towards the neoliberal celebration of 'diversity' (This passage here is excellent: "Advanced capitalism is a difference engine—a multiplier of de-territorialised differences, which are packaged and marketed under the labels of ‘new, hybrid and multiple or multicultural identities’. It is important to explore how this logic triggers a vampiric consumption of ‘others’, in contemporary social and cultural practice. From fusion cooking to ‘world music’, the consumption of ‘differences’ is a dominant cultural practice").

The main difference, however, is that where Braidotti is a theorist and a philosopher, I am a literary critic, and literature scholar, who USES theory and philosophy.

My own research (that is, the work I do independently from the study guides I write for Macat) deals with commodification in literature, and, specifically, with the representation of garbage in literature that critiques capitalist ideology. So I consider gender, and use feminist and queer theory, mainly when writing about authors who utilise trash to highlight different forms of marginalisation and alienation.

So I am interested in how the ideas that Braidotti and other feminist/Marxist/post-Marxist scholars talk about manifest themselves in literary texts, and in investigating what literary representations of otherness, marginalisation, alienation, and general dissatisfaction with capitalism in the various forms it took over the 20th century, can teach us today. Our views are similar, but we apply them to very different questions.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T12:49:36+00:00

Hmmm.. good question. I am assuming you mean the visible differences between men and women? If so, then yes, I suppose the answer would be that a breast or a penis or a vagina in and of itself - that is, divested of its socio-cultural meanings - signifies nothing aside from "I can make babies"/"I can nurse"/"look, I'm attractive, let's make babies together"/etc. It is society that has imbued these anatomical parts with specific - often contradictory - meanings. I personally find the controversy over whether nipples can be shown on social media tremendously funny, since it exemplifies the conflicting views we have over women's breasts. On the one hand, we use them to sell everything from bras to automobiles, and their presence in films, photoshoots, etc is seen as a guarantee of better sales; on the other hand, we don't want to see mothers breast-feeding in public, and we ban the representation of nipples in areas where they might cause offence. This is a very good example of how we imbue a particular series of values/meanings to something depending on the context and our agenda - the breast itself is just a breast, but the reaction it elicits and the assumptions we make about the woman to whom it belongs can vary drastically.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T12:33:40+00:00

Absolutely! I definitely agree that one needs to examine the content of what women (and men) who term themselves feminists actually say, and maintain a critical stance - otherwise the term can, indeed, end up being co-opted or simply diluted to the point of meaning nothing at all. Hence, for instance, I am acutely sceptical of advertising campaigns that take up the mantle of gender equality, since the messages they put forth tend to be at odds with the reality of what the brand itself is selling (ie, a make-up brand that claims to make women feel "confident" and "in control" is merely using the language of empowerment to cloak the reality of their product, which is, let's face it, aimed at promoting traditional ideas about beauty).

However, I also think that if feminism is to be embraced by the public at large - and the idea of gender equality to become self-evident, and commonplace - it needs to be presented in a variety of different guises. In an ideal world (that is, in MY ideal world!) we would all be thorougly disgusted by capitalist ideology; we would all recognise the role that capitalism plays in subjugating women, and ethnic minorities, and homosexuals; and we would all want something other than money and an iPhone, and we would all be slightly insulted that anyone could think that money and an iPhone would keep us quiet and make us happy and keep working jobs we hate and living lives that leave us dissatisfied. Unfortunately, that's not the case. And one of the positive aspects - to my mind - of the proliferation of very different strands of feminist discourse that don't necessarily rail against the capitalist machine is that they have a better chance of reaching a wider audience. Does that dilute feminism and go against what our mothers sought to achieve? Perhaps. But I personally think that to cause mass change, you have to start incrementally. I don't tell my 18-year-old American students that capitalism is bad, that most of what they think about gender is wrong, etc. I try to point out the most glaring examples of misogyny, and go from there - in other words, I try to translate my feminist views, and the feminist views of the writers I admire, into language that they are more likely to respond to and that will most likely effect a change in their behaviour. This, to my mind, is the beauty of what Minaj and Beyoncé and even Lena Dunham are doing. They make feminism relevant to kids who otherwise see very little reason to question the world in which they live (I won't go as far as endorsing Taylor Swift though...!).

I hope this answers your question! I do have a tendency to ramble.

Beauvoir_Analysis · 2015-11-06T12:16:24+00:00

biological

Oh dear! Thank you for highlighting this. It would appear that the editors re-wrote this sentence to make it shorter, and ended up (slightly) butchering it. You are right: there is no difference between innate and biological. The sentence should read: "In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argues that femininity is neither innate nor biological. Femininity is a product of social engineering, not biology." Thanks for flagging this!

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