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“I should comment on your appearance but I don't have the time.”
I'm taken aback when Gloria Steinem, the “face of feminism,” announces on the To day show that she's had “a little fat removed from above my eyes so I didn't look like Mao Zedong.” Steinem is referring to the puffy-faced Chinese revolutionary who died in 1976, around the time when her model-thin figure was featured on a Manhattan billboard, erected by antagonists intent on reducing Steinem to her body.
With Steinem's nod to Western capitalist culture, does she fear that the US feminist movement she's represented will falter and become irrelevant if she shows her age? Or does she believe that talking openly about cosmetic surgery will make her more relatable to the masses? Backed by her so-called choice, her message is clear: masking serious acumen and political heft — “womanliness as a masquerade” (Riviere 1929) — is key to this feminist icon's cultural viability. Steinem's endorsement of a surgical lift — especially if it can “buy you twenty years in the public eye” — rattles me. As I step out my front door, I feel like I've lost a feminist compass. I'm instantly less confident in both my body and my feminist role model.
And then I consider how I've really been let down by Gloria Steinem. She insists that feminists grow more radical with age, and yet she's been slow to embrace gender diversity. In a keynote address in 2015, Steinem erringly called attention to the “male privilege” of trans women who had lived at least part of their lives in their natal sexed bodies and assigned genders.
Steinem's transphobic perspective, echoing one strand of a multivocal feminism (Enke 2018), rings of a violent, exclusionary historical politic that perceives trans women as interlopers; this view also entirely misses the cumulative gender trauma of nonrecognition. Terri Fierce, a black thirty-four-year-ol