Nasty Bois: The Rise of Female Chauvinist Pigs

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar I
  In Paper Session: Confronting Heteronormative Discourse: Perspectives on GLTB identity struggles

Abstract

This essay discusses contemporary critiques of post-feminism, such as Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, that assert the necessity of reclaiming radical lesbian feminist principles. Such critiques forward that although popular culture’s focus on heteronormative objectifications of women was once dominated by men, it is now promoted by post-feminist practices of heteronormative pandering. Levy locates this change in the loss of the radical lesbian feminist project. In order to address similar contemporary feminist arguments, I contextualize the development of radical feminism’s inter-movement debate over appropriately feminist sexual identities and practices and sexualized, commodity culture. Then, I touch upon the advent of post-feminism as the ‘backlash’ to this debate. Finally, I argue that as Levy and others attempt to recover radical lesbian feminism, they counteract subsequent strides made in feminist thought and evoke the original criticisms of radical lesbian feminism as gender essentializing, sexually oppressive, racist, and ignorant of materialist influences.

Author

• Amber Turner, University of Texas, Austin