How would you design a culture that highlights aspects normally associated with femininity?

nyalathotep

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My contemplation of a matriarchy is a society that takes the traits associated with men and says those are okay traits for a man to have, but the traits associated with women is where the real power is at.
For example, motherhood. World-wide, from what I've seen, women are traditionally responsible for child rearing. Okay, how about a society that associated how well you raised kids with how well you would run a government? Can this be done effectively or does it fall into nepotism? Is there another way to write a matriarchal culture without turning women into men?
 
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NobodyMuch

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One way to avoid that last danger--turning women into men--would be to look at women's own work about what makes women distinctive. Beyond the obvious--only they carry another person inside of them--there have also been works in epistemology and ethics. Both of those texts should be approachable for someone with no theoretical background.

The key element would be to emphasize relationality, dependence, and care: the hallmarks of the initial maternal situation.
 

kuwisdelu

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Is there another way to write a matriarchal culture without turning women into men?

...huh?

OP, this is the third thread you've started on this.

What makes you think you'll get different answers this time?
 

Aggy B.

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Yeah. Diversity is a good thing. Thinking about how to present something a little outside the "norm" is also good. But it seems like you are really struggling to try and grasp this concept of not having men in charge. And I kind of wonder, if you're having that much trouble thinking of women as people, maybe you would be better off putting this idea aside for a while.
 

jennontheisland

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Feminine traits in western culture were defined by that culture. Are you talking about a culture that perceives modern western feminine traits as more powerful than modern western masculine traits? Physical representations like wearing tiny amounts of clothing that show off secondary sex characteristics? or the ability to wear high heels all day? or makeup? Or do you mean more social traits, like how women are conditioned to cooperate, to smile, and to be nice (to our faces and mean behind our backs)?

Also, what you describe isn't nepotism.
 

Roxxsmom

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Which traditionally feminine traits besides childbearing (not something all us women have done or have had a desire to do) and child care (and many of us who strongly identify as female aren't that interested in small children) do you have in mind? Gender identity isn't socially constructed, but appears to be fixed by a pretty early age in most people. But gender roles are socially influenced to at least some extent (or we wouldn't see so many girls doing and loving sports and many other things that used to be just for boys) and we wouldn't see any cultural differences between which genders are assigned which tasks.

We do have a serious issue in our culture, at least, with jobs that are done mainly by women being undervalued/underpaid. This can actually be witnessed, even in modern times, when a profession or specialty within a profession, that was once male dominated becomes female dominated.

With mammals, female animals end up caring for very young offspring, sometimes with a lot of help from the male or from female relatives, because being the milk bar means that a mother will have to spend a fair amount of time with her offspring before they're weaned. But after that, lots of possibilities exist. And even in the old days, women who didn't want carry their infants around with them everywhere found ways around this (like wet nurses).

As for the other care giving aspects of female roles, saying that a person who can manage a group of toddlers (or care for a bunch of patients in the chaotic environment of a hospital) can excel in managing a bunch of employees (or politicians) actually makes a fair amount of sense. And I'm not sure why you're saying that's possibly nepotism (which is, as I understand it, the practice of giving jobs and preferential treatment to members of one's own family (or to others one considers part of their "in" group).
 
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kuwisdelu

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Okay. *deep breath*

Because, I mean, I'm happy to discuss different cultural interpretations of gender and how ideas about gender identity and expression arise from a culture and its values over time, and how they can shift and change in response to different social pressures, and how this ties into creating systems of oppression in Western society and how those assumptions harm us, and how colonialism leads us to interpret gender in other societies through a Western lens and thereby misinterpret and misrepresent nuanced and different ideas of gender because it works from a faulty set of assumptions, and ways to combat that all day long, but...

This is not that. This is very 101 stuff that you got a lot of good answers to in your previous two threads.

You seem to be conflating gender-coded expressions (masculine and feminine) and roles with gender identities (man and woman), and misattributing how power is distributed based on these, and interpreting everything from the assumption of a Western cultural lens as default.

You're certainly not the first person to do this. It's a common mistake to conflate gender expression with identity, and on top of that misunderstand how a culture places values on both of these things.

Earlier waves of feminism attempted to create power for women by demonstrating that women can fulfill masculine gender roles and expressions. Women can wear pants. Women can be as hard-ass and aggressive as men. Women can succeed like men by expressing or emulating masculinity. However, while this made strides in gaining power for some women, in doing so, it also tacitly supported and affirmed the underlying assumption that masculine-coded expressions and roles are superior to feminine-coded expressions and roles. It supported the cultural notion that masculinity is better, more desirable, more powerful than femininity.

More recent waves of feminism have recognized this and sought to address this devaluation of femininity by explicitly questioning these assumptions, and re-emphasizing the power and value of feminine-coded expressions and roles.

However, both of these things are tangential to the other problem: the assumption that expressing masculinity is being "like a man" and expressing femininity is being "like a woman". This has led to frustrating characterizations of masculine women as being like a "man in a dress" (a common critique and characterization of 1-dimensional "action girl" heroines) and feminine men as being like women (a common critique and characterization of 1-dimensional gay male characters in romance genres). While there is often an underlying writing problem these critiques are getting at in terms of 1-dimensional characters and failure to consider differences in how men and women (and masculine people and feminine people -- because there is a difference) interact with the world, these characterizations are harmful and reductive in their simplicity and how they uphold the "masculine = male" and "feminine = woman" assumptions. There is a cultural hard link between gender expression and identity in Western society that we are finally trying to disentangle, and recognize that expressing femininity doesn't necessarily make one more like a woman, nor does expressing masculinity make one like a man. This addresses your question of "turning women into men". It's a question based on faulty assumptions.

And finally, there is this pervasive assumption that masculine and feminine coding is based on an underlying human truth that isn't merely cultural. And while I think there is some merit in how some aspects of masculinity and femininity may be common across some cultures, and there is room for discussion and analysis there, any such generalization runs the risk of misinterpreting other cultures and their nuanced ideas about gender through a Western colonialist lens, and often serves merely to further some biased agenda about what masculinity and femininity mean in the interpreter's own culture.

From there, you also run the risk of conflating cultural ideas about gender expression with cultural ideas about power. Is a particular expression or social role powerful because it's coded as masculine, or is it coded as masculine because it's considered powerful? This is the other central flaw in your question. Step back and consider how much of one's ideas about what is considered masculine and feminine are conflated with ideas about what is powerful, and who holds power in a culture, and how that power is created. This is at the heart of your question. And it's not as simple as "masculine" traits being powerful, but rather there is the possibility that we consider a trait "masculine" because we have been conditioned to associate masculinity with power, and a different culture might consider the same "masculine" trait as feminine-coded, or consider the same "powerful" trait as a sign of weakness.

A simple experiment to get an idea of how malleable our ideas of gender are, and how intertwined with systems of power they are: tell someone how desirable it is to be a good father, how it's important to serve as a role model for young boys, how powerful the father figure is, and then ask them whether being good at raising children is a desirable masculine trait or not.

Both power and gender are deeply cultural, and if you're creating a second world fantasy, you aren't burdened with Western society's ideas of them (though you should certainly write with your readers associations in mind).

Ultimately, you need to ask yourself not merely how to make "femininity" powerful, but what is power, and what is gender, in doing so, learn to question your assumptions about how these things are intertwined, and how much of that is based in deeply-seeded cultural ideas about who has power, and how they keep it.

It's not as simple as upper body strength and uteri.
 
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kuwisdelu

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Gender identity isn't socially constructed, but appears to be fixed by a pretty early age in most people. But gender roles are socially influenced to at least some extent (or we wouldn't see so many girls doing and loving sports and many other things that used to be just for boys) and we wouldn't see any cultural differences between which genders are assigned which tasks.

I prefer to think of "gender identity" as socially constructed and Julia Serano's notion of "subconscious sex" as innate. This allows for different cultural ideas about gender identity and cultural gender identities such as Two-Spirit identities, Hijra, etc, and makes gender identity a cultural expression of subconscious sex.
 
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JohnQPublic13

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Let's avoid the concept of matriarchy and patriarchy. The better question to me to ask is what does a society look like that is relatively equal in its representation? (It will never be COMPLETELY equal, that's the nature of life, but let's get close).

The easy answer to that it is to put more female characters into your story(then like the usual 2-3), and more importantly have them be a driving force behind the story. I think a lot of writers mistake being a destructive warrior and being a strong character. That is not the truth. Strength is about who moves the plot forward and who is just window dressing to check a diversity box.

If you think of women as strictly human beings and put them in leadership positions where they act competently I think the answer will come on its own. Just ignore the Hollywood action star trope.
 

zanzjan

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Let's avoid the concept of matriarchy and patriarchy. The better question to me to ask is what does a society look like that is relatively equal in its representation?

The OP wants to write a matriarchal culture for their story, thus the question(s) posed.