Feminine Subjectivity: from Possibility to Reality

“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.” - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952), p. 249.

Feminine Subjectivity: From Possibility to Reality

During the past forty years, theories of subjectivity were common in art and social science discourses. All of these different theories, as opposed to the past Cartesian model of subjectivity, were almost agree on this hypothesis that the subject is not a complete self-contained being who flourishes in the world as an expression of its own unique essence. However there are different approaches to theorizing the subject. Some of these theories try to establish a model for presenting the nature of the individual subject by showing how it has been evolved and shaped. This approach is mostly identified with psychoanalysis and the work of Freud and Lacan. The second approach, which mostly identified with Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard, believes that the subject is not a knowable and constant entity and in fact the subjective behavior is not revealed to us by nature but it exists within the demands that power/knowledge places on our individual body. However neither of these two approaches includes the important issue of gender in subjectivity discourse. Both of these approaches, whether presenting the gender as a kind of subjectivity formed by the nature (which identifies feminine as a by-product of the necessarily dominant masculine) or identifying gender roles under the influence of power/knowledge discourse, lean toward the same result, which is ‘the gender distinction’. In this essay I am going to examine the feminine subjectivity in the late 1950s and 1960s and also the issue of the gender distinction by drawing on Marsha F. Cassidy’s book, What Women Watched (2005) and examining an episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, “A Hairstyle for Harriet”.

The Gender Distinction

Since the major theoretical progress of nineteenth-century in science, the concept of Nature found its unique position in Western culture. Considering science’s grand narratives such as race, hormones or genes, we have usually referred to Nature in order to find a proper explanation for what we believe as norm in human behavior. Most of these scientific efforts in measuring hormones imbalances or seeking the gay gene are pointing toward an absolute belief that our social behaviors are not social in their origin but are inborn and that is why they are inevitable. This approach ended up in establishing the idea of ‘gender roles’ by ascribing some ‘natural’ traits to each gender such as the suitability of men to fight in the front line and the potentiality of women in caring for the family and children. There are many instances for this natural determinism of gender during the nineteenth-century as it appeared commonly in the sexology discourse. William Acton, the British medical doctor and sexologist in his book, ‘The Function and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs’ (1862) writes: “I should say that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind… As a general rule, a modest woman seldom requires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him.”
This idea of gender distinction and its by-product, gender roles, has been used even a century after, most commonly in the discourse of social science and gendered behavior. In “A Hairstyle for Harriet”, an episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, we could find many instances pointing to this distinction. First there is a general discrimination in the masculine barbershop that shows Ozzie in the opening scene and feminine atmosphere of the beauty shop that Harriet chooses for changing her hairstyle. In the lecture scene, monsieur Charles also ascribe some gender roles to his women audience such as ‘serving dinner to their husbands’ or ‘the challenge of keeping their husband interested for the success of their marriage’ which could serves for perpetuating this gender distinction and also could reminds us William Acton’s words that I mentioned earlier.

The Feminine Discourse

The new feminine subject created by gender distinction could not just exist as a naturally occurring subject, but it established by the work of power and knowledge to maximize the operation of this distinction. According to Foucault the disciplines of power/knowledge always divide the human entity into distinct categories through institutionalizing different discourses such as gender, power, academia and etc.
In What Women Watched (2005), Marsha Cassidy talks about the emergence of a new discourse that announced a specific female subject ‘who could engross herself in the amusements made possible by television’ as a symbol for daytime leisure (p. 11). She explains that this discourse initiates a comfort for women by validating their subordinated position in society and by bolding their feminine role as a homemaker. She also mentions that this feminine discourse had to reconcile itself with postwar ideologies of creating new standards for women’s physical appearance by ‘urging viewers to leave wartime plainness behind to embrace glamour’ and at the same time perpetuating the feminine role of housekeeping and creating a ‘mistress of household chores’ figure from women. In the “A Hairstyle for Harriet” episode, during the lecture scene on of the models presents a hairstyle called ‘The Egg Beater’ while she was holding a hand mixer. This could be a proper example of how culture industry depicts women both as premier consumers who could sustain American economy by being fashionable and glamorous and at the same time faithful to their duties within the house.
There is also another aspect of discourse in establishing social structures according to the taste and beyond economic means. This non-financial social asset, which Pierre Bourdieu called it “Cultural Capital”, could promote hierarchies of tastes according to education, intellect, dress, style of speech and other cultural appearances. In What Women Watched, Cassidy argues that this cultural intellectualism generated four levels of taste in American society: highbrow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow and lowbrow. The new emerged feminine discourse as she described in accordance to various terms such as glamour, charm, postwar and speaking subject (from p. 18 to p. 25) could be important in promoting those hierarchies of the taste. Everything from the way we dress, eat, talk and laugh, to the movies we like, the ambitions we have, the desires we feel even the shape of the body we exercise to produce are all could be ascribed to one of those hierarchies of taste through different discourses. The feminine discourse however, tends to position women in the category of middlebrow and specifically lower middlebrow. Cassidy writes: “The upper middlebrows… served as the ‘purveyors’ of highbrow ideas and the creators of those cultural products that were offered for consumption to the rapidly expanding mass of lower middlebrow.” In the “A Hairstyle for Harriet” episode, the character of monsieur Charles could be exactly at that ‘equivocal position’ that Cassidy describes for upper middlebrows and on the other hand his women audiences are a perfect example for lower middlebrow who are forever the target of advertisers. Monsieur Charles is totally familiar with feminine discourse and tries to intellectualize its terms in order to promote highbrow ideals as a consuming product for his lower middlebrow audiences. In the lecture scene he keeps using the term “sophisticated” for describing almost all of the different hairstyles that he promotes in order to “straddle the fence between highbrow and middlebrow” taste, as Cassidy writes. (p. 15)
The feminine subjectivity created by culture industry after the world war II is actually the result of disguising the politically and culturally determined differences between genders and establishing distinct social roles for them by using different discourses. This distinction is coming from purely human factors and is not pre-programmed in women by their chromosomes, their genes or their genitals. Although we born with certain body types but our gender subjectivity has been structured by the distribution of social and economic power and also by establishing certain patterns of behavior and modes of appearance.