Distorted Femininity: Challenging Gender Essentialism

Abstract

While Jeanette Winterson’s dystopian narrative The Stone Gods (2007) sees women reduced to their aesthetic value and adherence to socially accepted femininity, this seems only a stone’s throw away from the female protagonists of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996) and Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005). All three texts present women who are at some point ruled by essentialist models of femininity, keeping Bridget within a vicious cycle of calorie counting and self-deprecation, Eve within an unhappy marriage, and Spike confined inside her male programmed femininity which is, in itself, masculinized. Socially constructed femininity is hyperbolized by Winterson in her characterization of Pink who, having been “Fixed at twenty-four” (21) so as not to “lose” (20) her husband, represents the hyper-feminine woman of Orbus. While set on a planet which has seen great technological advancement, this has only worked to entrench the social issues we see explored in both Fielding and Smith’s narratives, with essentialist models of femininity still desired by men and often perpetuated by women. In making the concept of the human unstable within The Stone Gods, the feminine is also rendered so. It is this instability, across all three texts, which works to complicate and challenge essentialist notions of gender that rely on such models in the understanding and control of women. Smith also attempts to strip these models of their power in providing a narrative in which women are able to enact change and control over their own feminine identity. By drawing attention to the inequalities that these models produce not as unchangeable, fixed consequences but instead as something one is able to successfully challenge, all three authors present the possibility for social change, as long as we continue to oppose such reductive models of femininity.