How To Play A Feminist (1 of 2)

Feminisms don’t play.

Feminisms work. And then work more. Feminisms are occupied with women’s rights: in homes and in offices, with bodies, with technology, with health, and with politics. The feminisms of the past three hundred years (and further back) have all been inextricably entangled with these matters of gravity and importance. As such, there has been no playtime in feminism. And why should there be: why would a series of serious social movements have time to concern themselves with how women play and how they spend their leisure time?

But I submit that it is time for a playful (and play-filled) feminism.

This project began fermenting about a year ago because of my mother. My academic interests in gender and video games have often led me to use my mother as a test-case for new ideas. In my frustration with her total dismissiveness of video games, I finally bluntly asked, “What kind of video game would make you want to play?”

She paused. “How about a nice shopping game?” she asked, earnestly.

I wanted to be surprised at this remark, but I wasn’t. In the three-plus decades I had spent getting to know my mother, I realized, shopping was how we most often spent time together. For instance, when I, or my cousins, or her sister, would come for a visit, we would ritualistically scoop up my grandmother, so that three generations of women could go wandering around the shopping mall, looking for bargains at Macys, trying on lipsticks, and eating in the food court. This realization was unsettling, and yet I knew that my experiences of shopping-as-play were in no way unusual. I know many women that use beauty and shopping to play.

This is not to say that I am condemning consumerism or women for taking a part in it. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest that I am at all above sneaking away to Target for my play breaks from hours of study. Or, for that matter, using shopping as an excuse and vehicle for befriending and getting to know new women: I have done this many times and found it to be a highly successful practice.

The more I thought about this comment, the more uneasy I became. Seeking another opinion, I told one of my professors what my mother said. “A shopping game? Wouldn’t that be E-bay?” she pithily replied. Indeed, I realized that digital play, from video games to the internet often took on this consumerist guise.

I soon became attuned to the word “play”, and its uses in feminine spaces. I found it often in cosmetics and skincare departments, and in advertisements promoting gigantic sales where women could go on shopping sprees. Once I found it on a package of condoms being marketed to women.

Men, it seems, have more authorized, more playful kinds of play: they rule the domains of sports and video games: what can be called agonistic play. Masculine play often involves gatherings of men playing and watching sports, or playing and watching video games. Agonistic play—while competitive—comes from a Greek root which is slightly different from antagonism. It is about the camaraderie of competition. Whatever complaints one might have about steroid use in sports, or violence in video games, these things seem to be only bi-products and anomalies. Masculinity, it seems, is permitted to define play.

Femininity is often left out of the game, entirely.

But play is a necessary component of human life. Johan Huizinga, one of the most prolific sociologists to ever write about play and games wrote in his seminal work Homo Ludens, “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” If what Huizinga says is true, if play is a significant, undeniable, and vital function of human life, then it is important to examine it. And, if what I propose is true, if many women deny themselves this significant function, then this creates a real problem: we must dig deeper to understand the relationship between women and play.

Women’s play and leisure are most often linked to time: either too much or not enough. With many women still managing what has previously been called “the double shift” of managing the work world and the home world, women’s leisure plays out in snippets of time: knitting, television watching, and shopping to name a few alleged feminine play activities. This kind of play never becomes fully immersive and is about wasting time and filling time, not about having real and full leisure time. Women’s play is often also about making families happy: engaging in other peoples play. Playing with one’s children or taking on a husband’s leisure hobbies does not allow women to ever really own their play.

The resistance and troubles that women have towards leisure and play are not surprising. In fact, I would like to suggest (and have suggested in longer articles), that tenuous relationship between women and play is inextricably linked to the past three hundred years of Western feminisms (give or take a hundred years and a feminism or two).

Shira Chess is a PhD student in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and her home page online is shiraland.com where papers are available that explore these topics more thoroughly. This is a blog version of the much longer paper How to Play a Feminist (PDF|DOC). Part two of this essay will be published this Saturday, until then why not download a free trial of a delightful shopping game or check out the Feminist Gamers Livejournal Community.