Feminism at Duke has never been so strong. or so problematic. All of the Above, a set of monologues written and performed by Duke women and produced by Urgent Theater, opened Thursday to a packed, curious and captivated audience. The play, which is produced annually, provides Duke women the opportunity to speak out about the issues most relevant to them.
This year's issues included everything from pothead moms to bra-burning to the new HPV vaccine and the logistics of a tampon. For the first time since the controversy of last spring, Duke women were able to address feminism without one mention of the infamous L word, or its men.
The play was also successful in mapping out the many, varied and bumpy contours of feminism on campus and in delineating how Duke women maneuver these contours. Nonetheless, despite including a monologue entitled "Dearest Patriarchy," All of the Above failed to address patriarchy in all its forms.
In addressing feminism at Duke, it is important for us to ask, How are Duke feminists complicit in reproducing patriarchy on campus? In what ways do Duke feminists recreate social inequalities (and dominance)? And how do Duke women oppress themselves? After all, the big, bad man in the ivory tower is only partly to blame for the daily grind of womanhood on campus.
In the monologue "The Dress," actress junior Nathalie Basile (a stand-in for the author) buys a dress inspired by 1950s fashion because it makes her feel "girly." Although this girliness incites guilt, she justifies the purchase because, at the end of the day, the dress "sure does make her look good."
The author of this monologue likens the duality of her desires-the desire to be (and to dress like) both a feminist and a femme-to the hypocrisy of an anti-drug activist who smokes marijuana.
And she's not far off.
In the words of the popular feminist mantra, the personal is political. The desire to be femme and "girly" in one setting distinctly contradicts a woman's self-proclaimed (and often exclaimed) identity as a feminist in another setting.
But why is it important for a woman to be able to feel like a girl in the first place? Is it because femininity gets you further in the world than feminism? And if so, who creates that world? Men, or other women?
With the power of patriarchal rhetoric on their side, many feminists have been known to play into the traditional demands of femininity in an attempt to somehow subvert it. To paraphrase feminist and political theorist Linda Zerilli, these women don't need a man to tell them to be feminine. Instead, they socially construct their own femininity. and they become complicit in their own subjection. Or worse, they subject other women.
Feminists as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft have attempted to justify themselves and their attention to women's freedom within the confines of a patriarchal system-by folding into stereotypes of women as companions of men or virtuous, moral pillars of society.
But Wollstonecraft lived in the 1700s, and three centuries later, at Duke, we're still playing by her rules. Whether or not we mean to, as Duke women, we also determine our personal worth in terms of our relationships with men.
To return to All of the Above, and in the words of "The Dress": "In psychology, a person exhibiting divergent behaviors and beliefs suffers from cognitive dissonance.. Psychology textbooks say that in cases of such dissonance, a person will either change her behavior to bring it in line with her beliefs or change her set of expectations to accommodate the behavior."
But Duke women do neither.
Instead, like crazed schizophrenics with split personalities, we constantly fool ourselves into thinking we can be raging feminists in the classroom by day and girly femmes at the bar by night-that we can be both and that we can have it all.
Many self-defined feminists turn off their intellect and act in ways that are distinctly feminine if and when it suits them. But feminism, as an ideology and a lifestyle, is not something that one can turn on and off-and definitely not without consequences.
Whether we define ourselves as feminists, femmes or "all of the above," like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole-and despite our best efforts-with each stab at patriarchy, we seem to slip, fall and dig ourselves a deeper crevice.
Shadee Malaklou is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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