Femmephobia versus gender norms: Examining women’s responses to competing and contradictory gender messages

Abstract

While women experience pressure to be more feminine/less masculine, recent years have documented their simultaneous experiences of feeling pressured to be more masculine/less feminine. This phenomenon can be linked to the concept of femmephobia – the way femininity is devalued and regulated across bodies, identities, and various social locations. Despite the accumulating research documenting the existence of femmephobia across identities, how women respond to these experiences remains unexplored. Thus, the current study examined women’s ( N = 97) responses to femmephobia. Participants were asked to describe whether (and how) they attempted to modify any of the feminine expressions they felt were targeted in the femmephobic incident they reported. Results of the thematic analysis supported the hypothesized response types of amplification, suppression, and no change to feminine expressions following the femmephobic incident. We found that women overwhelmingly suppressed their femininity in response to femmephobia. Strikingly, while some women reported not making any changes, almost none of the respondents reported amplifying their feminine expressions in response to a femmephobic incident (and the few who did were all LGBTQ+). We theorize these findings in the context of women’s gender policing more broadly, specifically the tension between gender norms (pressure to be more feminine/less masculine) and femmephobia (pressure to be less feminine/more masculine). We argue that the frequency of suppressing femininity in response to femmephobia suggests that, when faced with contradictory gender messages, femmephobia may be more influential than considered by previous research.