What Does Femininity Mean to You? Part 1

 

If you had a chance to join us on Instagram Live last week, you might have gotten the opportunity to hear me ask the question: What does femininity mean to you?

 

As I have been discussing the context of my work with others and getting reactions and responses, I am finding something happening with my own definition of femininity: it is softening.

 

I am softening to the process of what this work actually means to me and how it is likely going to change me over the next year.

 

A really big part of me doesn’t want to label anything as inherently feminine. That’s so binary!

 

Like, make-up is feminine, flowers are feminine (their predominantly hermaphroditic and a huge part of their reproduction process includes pollinators and seed spreading critters), pink is feminine or worse, feminine is emotional, irrational and weak.

 

These are the ways in which the Patriarchal Perspective has screwed my understanding, expression, and judgment of what it means to be feminine and express femininity.

 

I’m going to have to overcome some of my own unconscious biases and rejections of femininity within my own life and personhood. To be frank, that’s sort of scary and liberating at the same time.

 

I’ll finish off with this, which I was able to articulate while talking with Jason Wilder during his artist talk. Ultimately, we live in a dualistic paradigm with non-dualistic tendencies.

It’s a paradox.

I love a good paradox.

It is my measure to hold capacity for the both/and. ‘Both/and” means it is ‘this’ and is it ‘that’ simultaneously. In this case, concerning femininity, it is both definitive and continuously in a state of flux.

 

This gives me some room to play.

 

Exploring my Feminine side with the help of Instagram Filters