Original article
The toilet paper: Femininity, class and mis-recognition

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Abstract

This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women's toilets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of redistribution. The first part of the article explores how the appearance of femininity as a form of cultural capital is utilized and theorized. It also shows how femininity is known and judged and frequently mis-recognised through historical classed positions that are premised on appearance being read as a value of personhood. This analysis is then applied to the empirical research, drawing on two different research projects to make its arguments. Using examples of the tension in women's toilets, it shows how the feminine-appearing body is judged on the basis of excess and devalued but also, paradoxically, given authority to shame and judge. The different processes of mis-recognition invoked in the toilets expose the way class underpins any reading of bodies on the basis of appearance.

Introduction

This article draws on two different research projects in the UK to make its arguments. First, the research that was published in 1997 as Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, based on a longitudinal ethnography with 83 white working-class women. Second, a collaborative ESRC research project1 on Violence, Sexuality and Space, currently being undertaken and for which pilot research began in 1997. The article is organised into four sections. The first introduces the contemporary politics of recognition, the second and third explore the constitution and theorising of femininity, and the fourth draws on the empirical data on tensions in toilets.

Section snippets

The politics of recognition

Recognition, both Nancy Fraser 1995, Fraser 1997 and Charles Taylor (1994) argue, is the new 1990's grammar for political claims-making. Fraser (1995) identifies a shift from the politics of redistribution (based on structural inequalities, which often focus on class) to the politics of recognition (based on what she defines as cultural inequalities, and often centred on gender, race, and sexuality2).

As Fraser argues, to be misrecognised:

… is not simply to be thought ill of, looked down on, or

Doing femininity

Femininity is the process through which women are gendered and become specific sorts of women. The process of becoming feminine, Smith (1988) argues, occurs in the spaces of textually mediated discourse, in the dialectic between the active creating subject and the organisation of her activity in and by texts, produced in the interests of a wider global market. The ability to engage in this dialectic is a matter of social positioning, access to texts, and different forms of capital. Being,

Feminist queer critiques

Femininity has created specific problems for feminist and queer theorists. Lynda Hart (1998) argues that in lesbian/queer culture/writing it is often assumed that the femme (the lesbian embodiment of femininity) is “invisible” without the presence of the butch. In other words, she argues, it is the butch's visibility that brings the femme into focus as a femme. Otherwise, she disappears into the optical field occupied by heterosexual women. There is always, Butler (1998) argues, the prior

Appearance as judgment

There is, therefore, a serious problem with the mis-recognition of the feminine whereby interpretation is based on appearance. The visual economy of a historically, raced, classed heterosexuality is often invoked when reading feminine-adorned bodies but is not acknowledged. Rather, it is read as a characteristic of the person. This is apparent in our recent Violence, Sexuality and Space research project. This research is funded for 30 months by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) as

Conclusion

There are two types of recognition presented in this article.10 First, there is the Fraser and Taylor type of politics of recognition, in which certain bodies are read, through their appearance (and dispositions) as having no value. They are, therefore, unable to access certain forms of capital and are limited in the ways in which they can utilize the capital which they possess. This is one of the processes that occurs in the toilets where symbolic delegitimation occurs through the reading of

Endnotes

See http://les1.man.ac.uk/sociology/vssrp.

See the debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler in Social Text (1997) 52/53(15), 3–4.

Lisa Bower (1997) shows how in the U.S. claims for recognition have taken a legal form, what she names as “official recognition.”

In Formations of Class and Gender I show how these theorists can be woven through with Foucault. This analysis is indebted to an Althussarian legacy that Butler (1999) suggests is also present in her and Bourdieu's work.

Bartky (1990)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Karen Corteen, Les Moran, and Paul Tyrer for being excellent colleagues and for their enormous contributions to the research project. Thanks also to the WSN 1999 participants, Terry Lovell for inviting me to speak at the conference, two searingly acute referees, other respondents, and friends who have shared many toilet experiences with me.

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