What femininity?
Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 8:27 am
To kick off some thoughts on what femininity is beyond the biological gender let me supply some quotes:
All by the way variations on dissolving all boundaries but its own, that is to include or become included to what is being identified with.Average opinion wrote:Showing or talking about feelings, listening skills, opening up, empathy, non-judgment, caring, maternal instincts and unconditional love, romantic eroticism, affectionate feelings, intimacy, letting go of control, sensuality, non-competitive & social grace.
Some Jean Baudrillard:Luce Irigaray wrote:"There is only one sex, the masculine, that elaborates itself in and through the production of the Other".
This femininity, the eternal irony of the community. - Hegel
Femininity as a principle of uncertainty. It causes the sexual poles to waver. It is not the pole opposed to masculinity, but what abolishes the differential opposition, and thus sexuality itself ...
All masculine power is a power to produce. All that is produced, be it the production of woman as female, falls within the register of masculine power. The only, and irresistible, power of femininity is the inverse power of seduction. In itself it is nul, seduction has no power of its own, only that of annulling the power of production.
For Pye...... the claim is that in this society femininity is naught but the signs with which men rig it up. ... Here femininity is said to have no being (no nature, writing, singular pleasures or, as Freud said, particularized libido). Contrary to every search for an authentic femininity, for a woman's speech, etc., the claim here is the female is nothing, and that this is her strength.
- all from the book "Sex Seduction Dating"The opposite hypothesis is just as plausible and, from a certain perspective, more interesting - that is, that the feminine has never been dominated, but has always been dominant. The feminine considered not as a sex, but as the form transversal to every sex, as well as to every power, as the secret, virulent form of in-sexuality. The feminine as a challenge whose devastation can be experienced today throughout the entire expanse of sexuality. And hasn't this challenge, which is also that of seduction, always been triumphant? In this sense, the masculine has always been but a residual, secondary and fragile formation, one that must be defended by retrenchments, institutions, and artifices. The phallic fortress offers all the signs of a fortress, that is to say, of weakness. It can defend itself only from the ramparts of a manifest sexuality, of a finality of sex that exhausts itself in reproduction, or in the orgasm.
Femininity in this sense is on the same side as madness. It is because madness secretly prevails that it must be normalized (thanks to, amongst other things, the hypothesis of the unconscious). It is because femininity secretly prevails that it must be recycled and normalized (in sexual liberation in particular).