Ulrika Dahl

Turning like a Femme: Figuring Critical Femininity Studies

A deceptively simple question has preoccupied me through my coming of (middle) age years in (Nordic) gender/feminist/womens studies: why, when we embrace (or at least engage with) critical masculi...

White gloves, feminist fists : Race, nation and the feeling of 'vintage' in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.

Sexism: A femme-inist Perspective

This experimental essay offers an auto-ethnography of sexism. Six stories are woven around considering sexism as an ontology, a theory of reality and being for feminists. Based on experiences of feminist training in the US and working in gender studies in Sweden, it discusses how (academic) sexism can become a career, a heritage and an expectation, but also how it gets below the surface and becomes sensational, often through (sexual) shame. Engaging the work of Marilyn Frye, Julia Serrano, Cherrie Moraga and Audre Lorde it aims to put ’sex’, as in sexuality, back into sexism. It also outlines how feminism can reproduce sexism by making femininity a problem.

Becoming fertile in the land of organic milk: Lesbian and queer reproductions of femininity and motherhood in Sweden

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

Femininity revisited – A round table

One of our motivations for this special issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies has been the paradox that femininity has posed for feminist theory. As we wrote in the introduction, it remains relatively under-scrutinised in the journal as well as, to some extent, more broadly in women’s/gender studies: on the one hand, a central problem especially for (white) women, on the other, a seemingly undertheorised concept. Curiously, while we have deconstructed ‘woman’ as a unified subject and object of feminism, femininity itself seems to still need further reconfiguration. As an afterword to this issue, special issue editors Ulrika Dahl and Jenny Sundén have worked with Open Forum editor madeleine kennedy-macfoy on inviting a few scholars who have influenced our own work and whose work in turn has developed theoretical discussions around femininity to a virtual round table discussion. We thank Professor Lina Gálvez-Muñoz and PhD researcher Laura Martínez-Jiménez, both scholars at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville) and members of GEP&DO Observatory; Gayatri Gopinath, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University; Clare Hemmings, Professor of Gender Theory, London School of Economics; and Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Race and Education at Leeds Beckett University for agreeing to share their thoughts here. First of all and by way of opening this discussion, we’d like to ask each of you what comes to mind when you think of the concept of femininity and how it works in your own research?