Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

The problem, then, is that seeking transnormativity does very little to actually address or dissipate transphobia. By making people forget that someone is trans, it also means they don’t have to confront the anxiety, fear, or anger that arises when someone destabilizes the binary understanding of gender.

Think of the smooth marble of the sculpted nude, or the supple roundness of the Venus de Milo: those proportions might not be the same ones exalted today, but to viewers of the time, the flesh, like the body itself, was perfect. A portrait can thus be judged by its adherence to the ideals of proportion: its skill in transforming the naked body into

part of the difficult, essential work of unruliness is shaking the status quo so thoroughly, so persistently, so loudly that everyone—even the very women behind that agitation, many of whom have internalized the understandings they fight so tirelessly against—can see their value within it.

“Is anyone shocked?” Picoult tweeted. “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t male literary darlings.” Weiner’s addition was a variation on the idea she’d been articulating for years—“When a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same subjects, it’s romance, or a beach

As with trans people, the most socially acceptable way to be gay is for nothing, save the existence of your same-sex spouse, to betray your queerness.

Put simply, to be homonormative is to desire all the privileges and rights that straight people have—including marriage, the right to have children, the ability to be thought of as a consumer. Many of those desires have become cornerstones of the gay rights movement, but they’ve also incited criticism, as they do little to interrogate the systems (

She should be assertive but not bossy, feminine but not prissy, experienced but not condescending, fashionable but not superficial, forceful but not shrill. Put simply: she should be masculine, but not too masculine; feminine, but not too feminine. She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and not recognized for oneself.”6 The process of representation is from subject to object—and, nearly without exception, through the brush, hands, or eyes of men.

As Weiner puts it, “Any woman who ever put pen to paper, or finger to laptop, has had to deal with sexism, discrimination and double standards, has had to fight harder than a man to get published, to get noticed, to get reviewed, to get profiled. I’m not saying that we all need to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but I wish that there was some recognit