One of the larger questions to me is the whole definition of femininity and femaleness. It's facile to connect female with fecundity, and 'feminine' with ways that enforce submissive status. But that leaves the issue of what does that mean to biological females (I'm going to shorthand 'female' as a term meaning 'having female biological equipment' as we do to describe other biological entities who appear to show binary gender, like animals. to separate it from 'woman' which can be a social construct) in history, who might have been unable or unwilling to have children? Were they not 'female'?
Of course we have the fairy tale figure of the 'witch', the ugly old hag who exists to disrupt society--that's possibly a reflex of the consequence of un-maternal females. The whole frauenfrage, the social issue of what to do with the 'surplus' of females in population (surplus meaning that there were more females than could safely be combined with men in marriage, the original 'free radicals' of society), indicates a social belief that the 'place' for women is 'wife' if not the ideal 'wife/mother'.
But we can't draw a simple line between woman and fecundity--females who reproduce outside the marriage bond still--STILL!!!--face the possible stigma of 'slut' or 'whore'. (As I write this, I have Terrible Television on in the background, where Maury Povich is currently once again giving us the gender politics bread-and-circuses spectacle of the 'paternity test results show' and hooooboy doesn't that audience like to jeer at women who do not know the father of their baby).
Now, this is all gender studies 101, right? You're probably nodding, going, YUP know this. Where it gets complicated, for me, at least, is when we detach the gender from the flesh entirely. Today, I just want to deal with the obvious example: robots.
And even then, I won't get to all of them.
Up on my reading list, as well as Haraway, of course, is L'Eve Future, the first appearance of the gynoid in literature. I know enough from having read about it to be already a bit intrigued, but we'll go into details as I get to it. But we have Hadaly, there, then of course Maria in Metropolis, the new Terminator in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Stepford Wives, and the various females in the Transformers continuities, and the Cylons in the reboot Battlestar Galactica. And I need to expand this list, but let's just work with that. We have 'gynoids' who fall into a few, sometimes overlapping categories: they are programmable to be better companions for males (Stepford Wives, Hadaly), they are dangerous (Sarah Connor Chronicles, Maria, Cylons), they are sexualized/seductive.
A side note about Transformers: The original continuity had a comic book origin for females (that entirely destroys previous continuity but the sheer malice behind this deserves some recognition), where the Transformers had no gender, until they came to Earth and these terrible Feminists complained that there were no women so the Autobots created a female, to placate these harridans. Predictably, she is gracile, pink, and curvy. However, as soon as she's created, the males don't want her to fight, or go into battle. Though it's intended to be a slam against those never-satisfied feminazis, the Autobots' treatment of Arcee is casually sexist, and even the table-turning ending, where Arcee rescues Optimus, the very robot who told her to stay out of battle, comes off as a bit smurfy, a bit of a one-off.
I gave a paper once, at NeMLA, attempting to, hoping to discover what Transformers writers were thinking when they constructed femininity in their robot characters, and Furman's longstanding misogyny aside (it's a lot to push aside, by the way, with his other Arcee origin story in IDW which is honestly...not much better as it falls directly into the tropes of female as 'male manque' and 'female insane rage', I could only conclude that they had...no idea. Without the notion of reproduction, female becomes the tropes we see above--seductive, sexual, dangerous, at worst, and existing to please 'their' men at...uh...best (?). And honestly, I can't resent them for it: I don't think anyone can really answer that question. What IS female? What IS woman? Is it shape of body, voice, the packaging? Is it relations to men, (like MacKinnon argues, in a sense) that the hegemony has only posited the existence of women insofar as they are useful (or anti-useful) to men?
This all seems like, perhaps, pretentious folderol, but I want to suggest a convergence of current events stories that makes me think this question has some urgency. Andy Hines's not-so-funny 'Invisible Burqas', Mohammad Al Dawood's Saudi self-help notion that men should sexually harass women who dare to have jobs, MSNBC's Erickson coming out against female 'breadwinners' they all call into question what female is and what female should be. Notice how several of these reduce women to sexuality, and/or consider the way to 'police' their behavior is through male action, and that uncontrolled womanhood is dangerous....wow.
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