Negotiating Womanly Roles: Identity and Space
I remember my first encounter with the concept of woman. She was about eleven inches tall with big blue eyes, round breasts, tight rear, and long flowing blonde hair. She had beautiful clothes, cars, and houses—even a perfect anatomical male counterpart. She was Barbie, and she represented what I thought women should be. In the bright pink packaging, she smiled with her perfect teeth down at my adoring face. I begged, pleaded, and demanded that this doll be purchased for me. On rare occasions, I got my perfect woman doll, but Barbie never remained in her pristine state. Like many other girls, I kept Barbie as perfect as I could until I could no longer resist the urge to “make improvements.” The scissors, markers, and instruments of doll torture came out leaving Barbie ravaged with uneven hair, colorful tattoos, and stripped of her clothes. Womanly perfection did not last in my destructive hands, or perhaps I restructured perfection into my definition not someone else's ideal.
If Barbie is not my ideal definition of woman, then what is woman? How does she function? I cannot offer a broad, universalist answer to either of these questions, but I can frame my answers within the idea of negotiation. For me, negotiation is an ongoing process in which I orient and reorient my self-conceptualization of identity based upon both external messages and internal narratives. I picture these negotiations that take place as beginning from within and progressively radiating outward. As I restructured Barbie to fit my concept of woman, I am always reframing, restructuring how I negotiate representations of my identity and space—my definition of woman.
As a woman, I am constantly reframing my identity. My feminine identity is not a static construct, but a fluid movement that interweaves personal internal narrative with the external messages about my identity. This does not mean that I exist as a unified identity. The process of negotiating requires at times that I bifurcate both outward and inward representations of self/identity. In Pan Chao's conduct treatise, she admonishes her daughters to construct an internal narrative of their beliefs(17). While these daughters may choose to remain silent about their internal narratives, theses constructs form an internal identity which manifests itself on the outward performance of the body. The outward performative act serves as buffer or defensive strategy to protect the woman while still allowing her to formulate her own set of ideals. For the modern woman, she has more power to choose what she keeps hidden and what she manifests. The woman recognizes the disjunct between these two narratives—one remains hidden in its entirety, and the performance of the inner narrative is open to the critique of others. Many women choose to keep their full inner narratives hidden and display only what they choose.
I believe that a woman's identity does not strive for unity between internal narrative and external performance. Through the internal negotiation of identity, a woman chooses a belief system, and this allows her to navigate the disjuncts between outward performance and inward narrative. In Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan advocates that women privilege their relationship toward God over societal expectations. With this caveat, the woman must practice an outward sincerity even though they disagree with the other person's actions(45). Women create an outward performative persona that will allow them to mask the conflicts that exist within their internal narrative or identity. By splitting the internal narrative from the external performance, these actions give the woman power over her identity by keeping her personal beliefs secret. She controls the full disclosure of her beliefs. This makes identity construction for the woman as an active process rather than a passive event in which society's ideals are imprinted upon woman .
Once the woman acknowledges the disjunct between the internal narrative and outward performance, she must negotiate the presence and performance of her body. I think this is a space in which a woman can have some form of unity. Since the body houses the internal narrative and identity, the body serves a janus function in that it unifies internal/external in one form, but it divides its function between performing as a defensive mechanism to protect the woman's unspoken ideologies and a visible marker of the effects of social construction. We see this division of internal narrative most clearly in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The female narrator has an overwhelming, almost disabling desire to express her internal narrative that she desires to be active through writing and social engagements, but her body and family force her to retreat inside her mind. In this moment, her body becomes her prison since the body cowers to the demands placed up it by the narrator's external familial relationships. We see the bifurcated identity from the body with the narrator identity. The body becomes the shell in which women retreat to protect themselves.
A woman's body negotiates the space between the inner narratives and the bodies' performances. The internal narrative occupies the position of power for women, but the body becomes a subjugated entity. According to Nancy Mairs in “Carnal Acts,” women displace their frustrations with patriarchal ideals of female perfection upon the body(394). Since women occupy a subjugated position in the patriarchal hierarchies, women attempt to have power/control over their minds and bodies. The body bears the markers of patriarchal hierarchies in that women adopt modes of dress, cosmetics, and physical shape,.The female body openly reinscribes power back upon patriarchy. In this way, women divorce their identity or internal narrative from the body. According Susan Bordo in her introduction to her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, this reinforces in the mind of women that their bodies are viewed negatively(5). The body provides a protective layer for the identity. The mind or internal narrative can only be revealed through speech or the body. If a woman is silent, then she protects her internal narrative from social scrutiny. Her body is always visible marker of her adherence to societal norms of dress, appearance, and modesty.
Both the identity and body negotiate interrelations that are at work within the woman. These negotiations become a balancing act for woman since she must protect and divulge the inner narrative through the vehicle of her body; however, this interplay is not her agency. She enacts her rhetorical agency in the way she negotiates her participation in domestic/public spheres. Through these interactions, she gives voice to her inner narrative and acknowledges the body as a vehicle for her participation. Since the concept of woman begins with the inner narrative and radiates out through the body, the space in which woman first enacts her agency is within the domestic sphere. According to Hilary Rodham Clinton in her speech “Women’s Rights are Human Rights ,” the domestic sphere houses the potential for enacting social change if the work performed in this space is given its proper recognition(4). The domestic sphere acts ideally as a safe haven in which women can make conscious choices that reinforce their inner narrative belief systems.
Women use their inner narratives as a guide for the early education of their children which takes place in the domestic sphere. According to bell hooks in “Engaged Pedagogy,” education should encompass all areas of a person's existence—body, soul, and mind. When women educate their children based upon inner narrative belief systems, they are putting into practice this idea of whole person education. Children see and mimic how women interact with their spouses which mirrors the gender normative roles in the public sphere. This places the woman in a position of power since the gaze of her children remains upon her negotiations of her inner narrative and body. In the 1939 film version of The Women, Mary Haines models this process for her daughter little Mary . Mary would not tolerate her husband's infidelity within her inner narrative. She enacts her agency through divorce; however, she still keeps the domestic sphere a safe haven for her daughter and herself. It is her retreat from the public sphere. Her performance of agency in the domestic sphere guides little Mary's potential future ideas of agency in both the domestic/public spheres. This education of children is a way in which women negotiate and enact agency within the domestic sphere.
As women practice their agency within the domestic sphere, they must also negotiate how that agency will and should be practiced in the public sphere—particularly, the academic public sphere. Women again experience a bifurcation of their identities since they enact their agency within the domestic sphere, but they are readily subjugated within the academic public sphere. Within the domestic sphere, women create their own discursive spaces in which they may speak the language of their inner narrative. According to Elizabeth Flynn in her essay “Composing as a Woman,” the academy does not recognize that women communicate with narrative(125). For women to practice agency in the academic public sphere, they must cross-dress and perform or communicate as men in order to heard in the academy. If they choose to remain in the academy, they could potentially experience an erasure of their feminine identities as well as their personal inner narratives. This is when I see feminist rhetorical agency as functioning differently than masculine rhetorical agency. For women, they negotiate the power that they have in the domestic sphere as a form of agency and synthesize the nurturing agency with argumentative agency that is heard in the academy. I see this as unifying the language of the domestic sphere within that of the public sphere. The new discursive space allows for an ongoing negotiation of women's identities in which the domestic sphere's discourse finds place within the academy. This allows women to function as women rather than performing as men.
I return to my first questions—what is woman? How do we conceptualize woman? My idea of woman does not existence in some idealized plastic doll but in the framing and reframing of my identity through the negotiations of inner narrative, body, and space. I enact my agency through my negotiations as a woman.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan R. Introduction. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of CA P, 1993. 1-42.
Clinton, Hillary Rodham. “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.” http://www.americanrhetoric.com
de Pizan, Christine. The Treasure of the City of Ladies. Trans. Sarah Lawson. Rev. Ed. London: Penguin, 2003.
Flynn, Elizabeth. "Composing as a Woman." College Composition and Communication 39 (December 1988), 123-35.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985. 1148-61.
hooks, bell. “Engaged Pedagogy.” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. 13-22
Mairs, Nancy. “Carnal Acts.” Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Ed. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001. 392-400.
Pan Chao. “Lessons for Women (First century).” Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900. Ed. Jane Donawerth. Lanham: Rowen and Littlefied, 2002. 15-21.
The Women. Screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin. Dir. George Cukor. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, 1939. Video. Turner Entertainment, 2001. DVD. Turner Entertainment, 2005.
Hi Sarah, thanks so much for coming by my blog today. Glad you enjoyed...and I find your work very thought-provoking as well. Would like to follow you back, but didn't see a place to do that.
Jennifer @ The Farris Wheel