Critical Femininities? Navigating Subversion and Conformity in Contemporary Visual Culture

This session critically examines visual manifestations of femininities, exploring their capacity to both challenge and reinforce societal norms. Historically cast as a patriarchal construct or a surface to be disavowed, femininity has been rearticulated through queer feminist frameworks as a performative stance rather than an ontological state (Dahl, 2012; Hoskin & Hirschfeld, 2018), with scholars emphasizing femme as a potential site for feminist and queer solidarity that challenges naturalized gender models (Hoskin, 2017; McCann, 2018).

We invite papers that analyze how artists use feminine aesthetics to ‘exist’ and ‘resist’ simultaneously (Duggan & McHugh, 1996). How, for instance, does the plastic excess in the work of artists like Juno Calypso challenge normative visual codes of femininity? In what ways do the hyperfeminine aesthetics of bimbocore navigate the space between subversion and commodification? As feminine aesthetics experience a revival in mainstream visual culture, it becomes crucial to interrogate the boundaries between deconstruction and the recirculation of normative archetypes, especially when they align with whiteness, hypersexualisation and neoliberal self-improvement (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2004).

This panel seeks to address a series of questions: What forms of resistance and visual reimagination do feminine and femme aesthetics make possible? Where do we locate the line between feminine performativity and its commodification? How do race, ability and class shape feminine and femme legibility?

Potential paper topics include:

• Femme drag and the subversion of gender norms
• Disidentification and queer-of-color critique
• Bimbocore, hyperfemininity and neoliberal agency
• Femme failure as resistance
• The politics of affect in feminine aesthetics