The Feminism of Everyday Life: Sexing the Politicial

the feminisim of everyday life

a web column

In my feminist theory class, about 10 years ago, my professor, the memorable Sally Kenney, asked us to think about shoes: "If a man were to wear women’s heels to a job interview, how would he be received?" A part of me, I’d like to think, registered the context of this discussion---gender policing leads to gender marking---but in Professor Kenney’s words it was another idea that took shape and more fully altered the way I think: Shoes are important, and political.

In ’91, when this occurred to me, it was a new era. Doc Martens had just arrived on college campuses to annihilate the incommensurability of sex-specific footwear. Soon the kids who wouldn’t have worn combat boots (or whose mamas wouldn’t let ‘em) were now saving up for Docs. Docs were cool. They were bad, yet you could wear them without getting into trouble. And best of all they were available in sizes for boys and girls.

For women the lug sole, steel-toe, lace-up boot option was near revolutionary. And it must have been overnight that Docs were canonized among the ladies-who-like-the-ladies as a staple component of androgynous fashion. Docs became a grand leveler, a democratizing device, and a message to our mothers and our gendered society: We will not wear flats or heels. We are not that kind of girl.

Maybe because I gave up my Docs years ago, I found myself a few months back lamenting the fact that so many queer girls are still wearing them. Wooed by the Angelic soles of John Fluevog, the bump-toe styles at Giraudon, and the countless and exorbitant brands available at Tootsie Plohound, I have apparently, in the years since Professor Kenney’s class, come to regard as Doc Martens as somewhat tiresome. But let there be no misunderstanding: They betrayed me first.

True, Docs once filled the niche market needs of alternative kids and middle-marching dykes. But the ability of Docs to resolve the uniquely queer shopping crisis---Oh, god, which department will have what I want?---has fizzled significantly, if only because their revolutionary power has. They have become, I am not the first to say, standard issue. These days I wonder if Docs as a sexual-identity signifier like the stiletto can speak to anything other than their familiarity, the sex appeal of the merchandise now being somewhat customary?

Granted, for non-girly girls, there is not much else on the plate. But (hello?) what do femmes wear when the boys’ shoes are for butches and the girls’ shoes are for straight women? Not only do I run up against this drama every season, it’s become a daily time-sucker: This princess is late to every ball because she so often doesn’t have the right slipper. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Stanford University professor Deborah L. Rhode, who, weary after too many SRO academic conferences, I guess, wrote:

I am convinced that the women's shoe industry is the last acceptable haven for misogynists. After a summer when the fashion industry seem to be offering little but sandals with high platforms or narrow spike heels, retailers this fall have shown thigh-high stiletto-heeled boots, pointy toe crushers andbacked mules. (Oct. 18, 2000)

When Rhodes and I say we have nothing to wear, we mean it. Shoes like these do not speak my language, work with my existing closet, or bode well for a bright fashion future. Most of all, they do not, as Deb Schwartz puts it in her Nerve magazine article on tomboy fashion, make me feel at home in them. (Feb. 2001) And neither my fashion sensibility nor my identity politics are that restrictive.

In fact, I am of many minds about shoes, which makes sense since I’m from Toronto, a city with an actual shoe museum. If I weren’t a poor publishing girl, I might be overheard saying that Manolo Blahnik and Sigerson Morrison are the most important men in my life. On the other foot, I don’t want to teeter around on heels, or wear knee-high boots 24/7, or be reduced to delicately portioned ground-skimming models either. For me, the feng shui of femme fashion is a meditative art---one cannot often be helped in a mall, and yet, one must be alert for the right pair should they appear.

My own complicity with fashion is a constant cross to bear. I rail against it. I hand over my credit card. I subscribe to Lucky, "the new magazine about shopping". And I don’t pay the bill when it comes. And although I have forsaken Docs and won’t go back, I am now hanging out with a girl who wears them as one of two pairs in her weekly rotation. And you know what? (How big of me is this?) I totally don't mind.

the feminisim of everyday life
Wondering what Feminism has done for you lately?Or what you've done for it? In "The Feminism of Everyday Life", Melisse Gelula discusses the practices and perspectives of third wave feminists through many cultural incarnations---from the implicitly personal (why everyone I know is in therapy or writing a book about it?) to the egregiously political (how to get through the Bush presidency?), and from academic topics (my cubicle partner doesn't know who Judith Butler is and she makes more than me, or why did I go to grad school?) to acceptable forms of popular culture (why "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" matters?) and consumerism (why good shoes are essential).