THE FEMINIST FUTURE IS NONBINARY

A transfeminist lens prompts critical questions, such as how do any of us explore our multigendered selves in a climate hostile to gender-nonconforming bodies? What’s required emotionally to step outside of a gender binary, to uglify as well as to beautify, to subvert rather than comply with restrictive categories and gender expectations? How do the politics of access influence surgical consumption? Whose business are the emotional outcomes of body-altering pursuits, and is happiness even the point? (Chu 2018) If a fuller spectrum of gender expressions, queer embodiments, illegible identities, and body sizes were recognized as legitimate, how might conceptions of cosmetic surgery — and beauty — change?

Many of my fortysomething cisgender contemporaries don’t question any part of elective surgery. On the hunt for Botox bargains, they regard negativity about cosmetic surgery as crunchy, and the idea of growing old gracefully and with wrinkles as old-fashioned, if not an oxymoron. They’ve adopted a brand of female empowerment endorsed by the perennially young actress Susan Sarandon who, in 2016, a decade after she had eye work done, shared her thoughts on cosmetic surgery: “I think women should do whatever they want to do.” With these peers, I feel clear boundaries around choices and a total freedom from judgment, as though each of us is only responsible for our own neoliberal selves and not each other. Choice and self-determination around reproduction and parenting, careers, gender identity, and body interventions are regarded as inherited rights. They fight for financial independence and fierce autonomy, but their stylized bodies convey a spirit of conformity with bourgeois society, uncritical as they are to intersecting systems of white, cis, and economic privilege. (Layton 2004)

Maggie Collins is one of these peers who welcomed me on her makeover journey. At dinner one night, I notice bright red marks across the tops of Maggie’s delicate hands, the effect of intentional burning by a laser that will “rejuvenate” her hands, she tells me. When I’m with Maggie, I do not dwell comfortably in my own skin. I feel far more aware of my physical imperfections and the interventions available to me for “fixing” them. She is what Andi Zeisler (2016) calls a “marketplace feminist,” someone invested in the illusion of free choice, who seeks individual solutions to personal uplift, often in the form of purchases.

On a recent crisp day, as I study the fine wrinkles on the sunlit face of my sixty-eight-year-old friend, I feel a sort of calm inspiration to do nothing, to grieve losses and disappointments, and to accept my declining body. I appreciate that living from within my body and the expansiveness of my gender are achievements that can shift sharply depending on the face I’m peering into. My feminist elders’ objections to cosmetic surgery are not only deeply held beliefs from within; they feel obligated to one another to protest elective self-cuts, which they see as an extreme point on a continuum of social control and gendered violence. The potential for social transformation, in their view, is contingent on feminist solidarity — not on individual empowerment through bodywork. This generation of feminism, however, is stymied to the extent that it does not fully support change and transition, including the trans movement.

Feminism is not a blueprint for personal conduct, Susan Bordo (2009) cautions. The old, prized standard of “authenticity” no longer distinguishes feminists from nonfeminists; minds are not isolated, biology is not sacrosanct, and the culture always seeps in. I won’t be donning Katy Perry’s pink stilettos, even if they were named after Hillary Clinton, but I applaud feminism’s aesthetic range. If a movement for gender parity evolves so that it is not a crumbling empire, like communism in China, feminists need to be freed from a police state of body monitoring. Patriarchy is perpetuated by divisions among people who most need social change, after all.

And feminists need to move beyond a totalizing perspective of women as a class denied inherent rights and subjectivity and get behind an intersectional agenda that is less invested in the category of woman and instead foregrounds justice for the people most oppressed by white supremacy: poor, gay, trans, and gender nonconforming people of color. The trans movement threatens the cis woman’s claim of gender oppression, built on the fight against patriarchy, which rests on a binary assumption, whose corollary is the so-called matriarch.

As nationalism lurks, the insistence on “pure” gendered bathrooms has as much to do with the projection of despised or feared parts of oneself onto the hated other as it does with the deep insecurity and identity crisis fostered by the disposability of not only older women with wrinkles, but of anyone who has failed at the American Dream and feels displaced. The virtue of purity — whether regarding sex, gender, or a body untouched by cosmetic surgery — is accepted as anachronistic outside of biological determinism, and yet this moralism still undergirds feminist attacks and defenses. An embrace of multiplicity, contradiction, flexibility, and curiosity, more than a striving for commonality, requires a tolerance for anxieties that any of us is bound to encounter when we dig deep within our own raced, classed, gendered complexities and interface with an other, whether a Gloria, a Terri, or a Maggie.

After I absorb the initial punch I felt at Gloria’s disclosure of cosmetic surgery, I appreciate that cosmetic compliance does not preclude fighting against transphobia and gender hierarchies. Modern-day feminists insist that how we live in our bodies and experience gender is as idiosyncratic as it is political. (Stryker, 2017) Decades ago, trans pioneer Sandy Stone referred to the engaged life as one marked by continual transformation. Changing with the times is progressive; Jane Fonda (who once shared that she wishes she’d been “brave” enough to opt out of cosmetic work) affirms: “Any healthy country, like any healthy individual, should be in perpetual revolution, perpetual change.”

To the extent that we are all always already entrapped in a power system, Gloria Steinem’s eye lift signals a willingness to flex with a culture in transition, but her elective surgery is also a concession based on a limited view of femininity. With so much reworking of the social body still to do, to focus on Gloria Steinem’s cosmetic work is surely a distraction and, as she asserted long ago, a waste of time. ■