Celeste Oon - Supplemental Post #5

This week, I wanted to think through notions of… “competing” femininities and feminisms. Similar to one of the central debates in Barbie (2023) surrounding whether Barbie was a bimbo or a feminist figure of empowerment, there seems to be an ongoing tension between how women express their femininities. In some ways, particular femininities are (de)valued over others, creating a sense that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of expressing gender.

We’re seeing this discourse unfold on social media, largely through platforms like TikTok and Twitter/X. Over the past several years, there’s been a trend of labeling things as “girl _____,” one of the earliest popular iterations being “girlboss.” This term was created to advance the notion that, yes, girls can be bosses too, and a lot of women took it up to signal a type of neoliberal grinding culture, ultimately symbolizing their advancement as professional career-women. But there was also some minor pushback from women who did not like the placement of the word “girl” before “boss,” viewing the term as almost trivializing their accomplishments by having to qualify their success with their gender.

Even more pushback has been generated against recent trends such as “girl dinner,” “girl math,” and the “I’m just a girl” phrase. Girl dinner was originally used to denote meals consisting of random snacks and small foods that do not go together at all, yet would be able to satiate someone for a “meal.” (Though this trend also encompasses simply not eating enough for a meal.) Girl math was used to signal a type of logic (initially numerical, but later more generic) that, in reality, does not make sense but can be reasoned through with some form of alternative argumentation (i.e. “If I pay for something with cash, it’s free, because I won’t see it on my bill later,” and “If I return an item I bought, I just made money”). Both of these terms were used by women to ironically poke fun at their own practices and bond over shared experiences that they felt were quite unique to them (as opposed to men, who largely did not understand nor relate to the trends). “I’m just a girl” patterned similarly, rising as a way to discuss any type of activity or practice that women felt were common to their own experiences, or alternatively, to justify mistakes they made by brushing it off as them being “just girls.” Of course, the women who’ve participated in these trends are largely making fun of themselves. But this practice has since received a lot of criticism for supposedly infantilizing women, and making them seem “dumb” and “incapable” of performing basic tasks or understanding basic logic. Critics view the trends as misogynistic, and effectively anti-feminist.

I’m curious to see if anyone has thoughts on these debates. I personally don’t have a strong opinion about any of it. While I can understand why people could critique these trends, I also think people should be allowed to have fun. (And I do think that the reclamation of cute and hyperfeminine aesthetics as forms of empowerment is related to the central debate surrounding this issue.)