Swastika Jajoo

i still can’t say ‘femininity’ without tripping on the i’s-
feminity – feminininity – femininity.
you see, if only it fit as well on my tongue as it does in all these dictionaries.
for instance, an established definition of femininity reads something along the lines of
‘the quality of being female; womanliness’
and supports it with an appropriate example sentence, “She celebrates her femininity by wearing make-up and high heels”
and I feel defeated in my own skin because I don’t do very well with either make-up or high heels
but will still insist on being called feminine. 

As Wikipedia, our well-wishing aunties and pretty patriarchy will tell us, femininity is both biologically-created and socially-defined,
socially-defined meaning
pretty frocks and gowns from age five and fresh flavours of old frowns each time an outfit borders on boyish,
 socially-defined meaning
bookstores bringing to us collections of ‘Colouring Books for Boys’ and ‘Colouring Books for Girls’
and our boys, they start despising Cinderella and our girls scoff at robots,
we’ve brought up generations making the boys believe that everything ‘technical’ is the way forward for them and the girls believe that domesticity will be inescapable but a degree in Arts is harmless
and then we have mighty critical analyses on why women aren’t coders or why the sex ratio in our engineering colleges is abysmal. 

Our femininity is rooted in the closet and unless it is a tied-up bow behind a pretty dress,
we will never be feminine enough.
Unless our femininity is an over-the-counter purchase where the vendor is quote-unquote “culture”
we will never be feminine enough.
Unless our femininity is good manners small talk hushed talk silent talk literally no talk, we will not be feminine enough.
To be able to celebrate our femininity, we’ve got to be a certain type
stick to the hype, a certain kind of nice, a shut-up kind of wise
but some of us despise the example sentences in dictionaries
so we write our own, we tell our stories, we spit our poems out, we sing about
about unwaxed legs
no lipstick
short hair
celebrating femininity
in baggy pajamas and oversized slippers
neckties and waistcoats.

this is to tell you that i will not be rendered un-feminine
because my ‘manifest’ personality traits don’t match regular ideas of femininity, that my celebration could be socially awkward but still be a celebration,
that taking pride in my identity
doesn’t mean living it exactly the way
my mother does or my grandmother does or my sister does,
it is one thing to revel in a legacy,
another to let it oppress you. 

When I got my nose pierced, it elicited a variety of reactions including
“This is a step towards becoming more womanly”,
“OMG you’re looking so girly!!!”,
“I’m sure you did this so you’d stop looking so gay, you know, with the haircut and all”, and there are so many times when I want to cringe and cry,
to tell people that maybe I got my nose pierced because I like shiny things
hell, maybe I’m a niffler
and my nose-pin is not an emergency attempt at reclaiming my ‘lost’ femininity
but this poem is an emergency plea to tell you to please understand
because so many of us don’t fit so easily in the bodies we have
we’ve waged a war against them for so long but are finally trying to make peace
and maybe this is all too much to take but we can all find our intersections in the forms of hugs and handshakes. 

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