I really love the angle we’re seeing here. Fundamentally it seems the story is about feeling alienated from your sense of self and happiness because others have decided (and frequently told you) that your body doesn’t fit your location within gender. Like what you want isn’t something that someone with your body gets to have. I actually think we don’t get that super often, at least from this direction. I mean yeah if you look at it just from a perspective of non-femme > femme it looks like a shitty trope, but like of course it does because you’re not including any of the other context.
Yes, the direction she’s going seems to be toward something more normative, but this is (at least to me) pretty clearly an example of someone healing from being precluded things that everyone else of your gender is just assumed to be able to have. Just as gender roles try to constrain how women are allowed to be, they also constrain who is allowed to be a woman, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here—the shitty idea that women are supposed to be small and weak is defended not just by degrading women when we try to be otherwise, but also excluding us from womanhood when we aren’t those things. The influence of patriarchy tries to reject counterexamples from both directions, because both show that the order and structure gender is constructed to provide are ultimately false, and reality is not so easily constrained into strict binaries.
I really fucking feel this as a trans woman, seeing some of my tall trans sisters wrestle deeply with feeling like they aren’t allowed to be femme or pretty—just as cis society tries to tell us we owe it femininity, it also tells us, especially tall or non-passing women, that they can’t have femininity. It’s a paradox meant to make us feel responsible for our own exclusion. Some of us aren’t femme, but we should have the fucking choice. Not being able to chose where you show up in gender always fucks you up.
Even when what society forces you to do aligns with what you want to do, it steals the agency and liberating self-expression that would come from a fully voluntary act of self-representation. We have high femme women in the lesbian community for a reason, and part of that reason is that wresting femininity away from the heteronormative patriarchy and claiming it for one’s own purposes is a powerful, transformative act. It says, “you don’t get to tell me whether or how I get to have these things, I decide that. I do not accept playing your game as a condition for having these things.”
So yes, I’m fucking hype for our protagonist learning how to break out of the negative bind of gender rolls, and I think it will be beautiful watching her learn that she gets to have her gender, and I strongly disagree with the perspective that she’s capitulating to the patriarchy. Capitulating would be letting yourself be erased, which is sort of what she has been doing, and I’m excited to watch her bloom into a gay ballroom femme.
last edited at Oct 15, 2020 8:19PM
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