ALT Book cover for "This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation" by Emma Heaney, featuring a stark black cover with a white, sketch-like illustration of two reclining figures (a parent and a child) standing next to an endorsement quote from Sophie Lewis, author of 'Abolish the Family.' The quote reads: "This book will be recognized as one of the major and most vital interventions of the decade."
ALT That is what I’m advocating. Cisness, as the racialized presumption of sexed naturalness, actually affords a great deal of gender expansiveness to white bourgeois people, and in our era this modality of cisness is most visible and significant in the availability of masculine priority to bourgeois white women. One has only to think of the centrality of Crossfit and machine gun masculinity to a MAGA woman like Marjorie Taylor Greene, herself a crusading transphobe. Or TERF valorization of an ill-defined normal, neutral expression of gender over a mocked femininity, which also often comes with a sort of confession of youthful masculinity, presented as the tragedy that they might have been trans boys or misrecognized as such. Or the liberal commitment to the “successful” woman leader who has triumphed over the attempts to contain her in the limiting work of social reproduction. We might think of Greene, J.K. Rowling, and Hillary Clinton as emblematic hanks of this braid.
ALT How do we name the reality that these groups of women attain priority and power from the ways they work, work out, dress, and carry themselves, ways that supposedly violate the “stereotypes” or norms of “female gender?” I’m saying that they are not violating norms. Rather, the latitude for white women to engage in masculinist behaviors, even the incentive to do so, is itself an exercise of cisness as a way to express white identity in this moment. The presumed normalness and neutrality of the sex of white people––the cisness of whiteness in other words––is emphasized and enacted, rather than violated by these social forms.
