Page 91 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Femininity For cultural studies, femininity is an identity category that refers to the
social and cultural characteristics associated with being female. It is a discursive-
performative construction that describes and disciplines the cultural meaning of
being a woman. As such, femininity is to be understood as the culturally regulated
behaviour held to be socially appropriate to women. Thus, for cultural studies
femininity is not an essential quality of embodied subjects but a matter of
representation by which sexual identity is constituted through ways of speaking
about and disciplining bodies. As such, femininity is a site of continual political
struggle over meaning and there are multiple modes of femininity that are enacted
not only by different women, but also by the same woman under different
circumstances.
According to Kristeva, femininity is a condition or subject position of
marginality that some men, for example avant-garde artists, can also occupy.
Indeed, it is the patriarchal symbolic order that tries to fix all women as feminine
and all men as masculine, rendering women as the ‘second sex’. Kristeva suggests
that the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities
may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. Sexual identity concerns the
balance of masculinity and femininity within specific men and women. This
struggle, she suggests, could result in the deconstruction of sexual and gendered
identities understood in terms of marginality within the symbolic order.
Links Feminism, gender, identity, patriarchy, performativity, representation, sex

Feminism Feminism can be understood both as a diverse body of theoretical work and
as a social and political movement. In either case, feminism has sought to examine
the position of women in society and to further their interests. Feminism has
become a major influence within cultural studies and indeed they share the view
that knowledge production is political and positional along with the wish to engage
with, or be a part of, political movements outside of the academy.
In general terms, feminism asserts that sex is a fundamental and irreducible axis
of social organization that, to date, has subordinated women to men. Thus,
feminism is centrally concerned with sex as an organizing principle of social life
that is thoroughly saturated with power relations. Most feminists have argued that
the subordination of women occurs across a whole range of social institutions and
practices with a degree of regularity that makes it a structural phenomenon. This
structural subordination of women has been described by feminists as patriarchy
with its derivative meanings of the male-headed family, mastery and superiority.
Feminism has adopted a range of analyses and strategies of action. Thus so-called

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