New Racial Landscapes by Malcolm James Helen Kim Victoria Redclift

Author:Malcolm James, Helen Kim, Victoria Redclift [Malcolm James, Helen Kim, Victoria Redclift]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317629160
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Mocking statements such as ‘you should have gone to Specsavers’ are used not only to regulate gender norms but also intended to enact a compulsory heterosexuality, punishing women who do not adhere (Wilkins 2004). The phrase is from a recent advertising campaign from the UK discount eyewear chain that suggests that you can avoid potentially embarrassing situations by buying an affordable pair of glasses. In Jas’s case, the subtext was the suggestion that she should be embarrassed for looking out of place in the club, having not followed conventional aesthetic codes that signal (hyper-)femininity. But her comments also indicate how the reading of these feminine dress codes are highly gendered as well as (hetero-)sexualized in that it was the young men who perceived Jas’s style as a potential threat to norms signalling sexual availability. In contrast, the young women were far less critical and more supportive of Jas’s style choices.

Equally important, Jas’s comments of ‘put some clothes on’ exemplify how she reasserts the dominant disciplinary discourses of the feminine body on other women. This reveals her own internalization and redeployment of these normative codes of femininity, particularly singling out women’s bodies that exhibit an excessive (working-class) femininity, overt sexuality as well as an ‘undisciplined’ body – chastising their inability or refusal to self-regulate their bodies in the name of ‘decency’ and ‘respectability’ (Skeggs 1999). These forms of criticism and shaming other young women exemplify the performance of identity. Of course, post-feminist discourses that constitute a normative and proper femininity also suggest that female emancipation comes through choosing a certain amount of sexual agency (Gill 2003). It has also been argued that women must walk a fine balance between adopting a desirable and attractive femininity and appearing too sexually available and too provocative (Lees 1993).

These performances of femininity coincide with the performance of ethnic authenticity. Jas admitted: ‘There’s some of us who are in the gray area. And we’re always looked down upon by other Asians because someone always called me a coconut, or an Oreo or something like that.’ Her abject ‘coconut’ status conveys how the body and its performance get reduced to the sign of feminine and ethnic ‘identity’ so that Jas’s disruptive appearance calls into question her being able to claim these identities. Not unlike Hema’s clubbing experience, in which she was deemed not ‘typically Indian’ by men, in Jas’s case also it was the young men who felt that they could police these boundaries and remark upon what they considered an ethnic transgression.

Such performances of gender and ethnicity are further informed through the heteronormativity of the desi club space, in which keeping in place the ‘heterosexual imperative’ (Butler 1993, p. 2) through heterosexual gender roles and sexual spaces become crucially performative of ethnicity. Heteronormativity is often imposed and made material through the spatial organization and hierarchization of the club space (Bell and Valentine 1995). For instance, the social dynamics of the dance floor is often shaped by these norms. A wall of booths circling the dance floor

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.