A friend posted this extract from The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (which is a great book that I'd encourage everyone to read):

It's a lovely passage, and it got me thinking about approaches to gendered activities. (Obviously, I'm thinking of needlepoint as gendered in the sense that our culture tends to associate this activity with women, not for a moment as if there's any inherent or essential link between women and needlepoint.)

Let's assume that in a better world than ours, everyone who enjoys needlepoint should be able to do so unhindered by societal expectations or internal cognitive friction (and no one who doesn't should be made to feel uncomfortable, either.) It seems there are two competing feminist approaches to this problem.

First, we could accept the gendering of needlepoint but encourage people to forge their own identity that accomodates that, as in the text. So if that was my hobby, I could just (just!) identify as, say, a beard-wearing non-binary person who also enjoys some conventionally feminine crafts. I like that - that's cool.

Or alternatively, we can focus on unhooking (thank you) needlepoint from gender. We might do this by foregrounding examples of men who like needlepoint or women who don't. I'd imagine this is probably the sort of approach that most people would traditionally associate with feminism. It says that your gender has nothing to do with your propensity or enjoyment for certain kinds of activity.

In the long term, they seem to tend to the same, or very similar, places. Imagine iterating the first over every hobby, fashion choice, name, career, personality trait, in fact everything that is gendered by our society. You get as many genders as there are people, with the result that everyone gets to be who they want because gender becomes just another word for identity. Or, according to the second approach, we should be working to DEGENDER ALL THE THINGS so that ultimately there's nothing left by which to determine gender and everyone is just... who they are. Either way, a better world.

Why would we choose one over the other?

Well, degendering stuff is hard. Really. Working with teenagers I see every day the scale of the task, how entrenched gender roles are already for them, and probably will be for most people for at least another generation. So, maybe the first approach is better: we disarm gendered activities. With a Judo move we absorb society's gendering by expanding our own.

On the other hand, every such decoupling we do achieve is a small victory over capitalism. Because capitalism wants us, needs us, to identify ourselves through our material choices. I don't just like my hobby, I like being someone who likes my hobby and I love to be seen as such. I'm so much easier to sell to that way. And what should hobbies have to do with gender anyway? Isn't the second approach more progressive, more anticapitalist than the first? Does that matter?

Is this, then, one of those cases where feminism has to balance its Liberal and Radical tendencies? To choose between individual remedy and structural change? Or can these needs be reconciled somehow? As you can tell, I'm conflicted. This issue has a load of personal resonance for me, but that'll have to wait for another, more difficult post.