Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [63]
The literature on sex equality is shot through with accounts of this predicament, variously described as a “double bind,” a “Catch-22,” or a “tightrope.” In many workplaces, women are pressured to be “masculine” enough to be respected as workers, but also to be “feminine” enough to be respected as women. (I put the adjectives “masculine” and “feminine” in quotation marks when otherwise unmodified because I use them to describe perceptions rather than realities about traits held by men and women.) The sheer mass of evidence further persuades me that demands for conformity made of women are not generic, but target them as women. I also become convinced these contradictory demands mean the story of contemporary sex discrimination is more complex than a simple narrative of forced conformity to the dominant group.
To see how distinctive this Catch-22 is to women, consider the absence of a gay equivalent. If gays were in the same position as women, straights would constantly ask me not only to cover but to reverse cover. If I dressed conservatively, I would be asked to wear edgier attire. If I “acted straight,” I would be urged to be more flamboyant. But I do not think gays occupy this position. With significant exceptions of the “queer eye for the straight guy” variety, straights generally ask me only to cover. In my experience, the reverse-covering demand is more likely to be made by gays themselves.
Racial minorities are more like gays than women in this regard. If I, as an Asian-American, “dress white” and speak “perfect unaccented English,” I will find safe harbor. Whites make occasional reverse-covering demands—“Speak Japanese so we can hear what it sounds like,” or, “No, tell us where you’re really from.” But again, I have fielded reverse-covering demands more often from other Asian-Americans, who tell me to get as politicized about Asian-American issues as I am about gay issues.
When gays or racial minorities are caught in the crossfire of covering and reverse-covering demands, it is often because we are caught between two communities. The majority community (straights or whites) makes the covering demand, and the minority community (gays or racial minorities) makes the reverse-covering demand. Recent literature on African-American “oppositional culture” illustrates this dynamic. In response to white demands that African-Americans “act white,” some African-Americans have developed a culture of “acting black.” An African-American could easily be caught in a Catch-22, but not one generated by whites alone. More generally, negative epithets for racial minorities who cover—such as “oreo,” “banana,” “coconut,” or “apple”—seem to come from minority groups rather than from whites.
What makes women distinctive is that the dominant group—men—regularly imposes both covering and reverse-covering demands on them. Women are uniquely situated in this way because their subordination has more generally taken a unique form. Unlike gays and racial minorities, women have been cherished by their oppressors. Men have long valued the “feminine” traits women are supposed to hold, such as warmth, empathy, and nurture.
The mind-set through which men limit women in the name of loving them is known as “separate spheres”—an ideology under which men inhabit the public sphere of work, culture, and politics, while women inhabit the private sphere of hearth and home. The two spheres ostensibly track the different characters of men and women—men are thought to be suited for the public sphere because of their “masculine” attributes, women for the private sphere because of their “feminine” ones. This ideology permits men to cherish and to confine women at the same time—women are revered, but only in the home. In Democracy in