Maroon shirt: Paix, remixed
Striped knit cardigan: Old Navy
Skinny jeans: Gap, remixed
Gray socks: Target, remixed
Brogues: Trotters, remixed
Where:
Downtown/to the Art Institute with Joe, home for laundry, 30 Rock, and naps
Today was one of those rare days when Joe and I have time off together. Because of MLK day, my office is closed, and Joe didn't have to start work until this evening, so we got to spend the majority of the day together. We slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, and then went downtown to enjoy the city.
We had lunch downtown and ended up spending over an hour getting into this great discussion of gender norms. The deeply dichotomous idea of masculinity and femininity has been a point of contention for me for some time. Even basic adjectives are loaded with gender bias (can a dude's outfit really be romantic?), and while it's difficult to cut them from everyday use altogether - and I'm not sure that that's the right approach, anyway - I try to at least use them with the awareness of their deeper, gendered implications. In any case, when I don't align myself with "girly" things or ideals, whether it be as superficial as a short haircut or as deeply entrenched as a resistance to socially-enforced sexual norms and mores, I become less "feminine", less of a woman. What is particularly interesting to me is the string of connections that are made from one point to the next. By having short hair, I am less girly, and therefore less feminine. Once I have become less feminine, my role as a stereotypical "woman" is diminished, and I no longer fit into the role that I have supposedly been biologically pre-programmed to fill. (I realize, of course, as a disclaimer, that I am making pretty sweeping generalizations with these statements, but for the sake of argument and expediency I'm leaving it pretty loose.) This is a hard pill to swallow for me, because I take great pride in my womanhood, and believe deeply that being feminine has as little to do with a haircut as it does with what you had for breakfast that day. For that matter, I think that it really has very little to do with which sexual reproductive organs you were born with either, as gender is an almost exclusively social construction. So while I am a woman, and I am fiercely feminine in some aspects, I have elements of my personality that are masculine as well, and those elements do not make me any less of a woman. I'm going to go ahead and stop there, because I've probably scared you all away with my sudden existential rant, but feel free to chime in with your comments. Also, if you're interested in the issue of gender norms and biases, and how they relate to fashion, I'd highly recommend reading some of Academichic's posts about this very topic. Not to mention the plethora of inspirational "I am woman, hear me roar" posts over at Already Pretty. Seriously. My little gender-norm-bending paragraph is just a drop in the bucket. Thank goodness.
Title song: Shania Twain, "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!"
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