Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3/4, pp.

295–307, 2001
Copyright © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd
Pergamon Printed in the USA. All rights reserved
0277-5395/01/$–see front matter

PII S0277-5395(01)00186-8

THE TOILET PAPER: FEMININITY, CLASS AND

MIS-RECOGNITION

Beverley Skeggs
Department of Sociology, Roscoe Building, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Synopsis — This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both
its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women’s toi-
lets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy
Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of redistribution. The first part of the article explores how
the appearance of femininity as a form of cultural capital is utilized and theorized. It also shows how
femininity is known and judged and frequently mis-recognised through historical classed positions that
are premised on appearance being read as a value of personhood. This analysis is then applied to the
empirical research, drawing on two different research projects to make its arguments. Using examples
of the tension in women’s toilets, it shows how the feminine-appearing body is judged on the basis of ex-
cess and devalued but also, paradoxically, given authority to shame and judge. The different processes
of mis-recognition invoked in the toilets expose the way class underpins any reading of bodies on the ba-
sis of appearance. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION

This article draws on two different research
projects in the UK to make its arguments.
First, the research that was published in 1997
as Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming
Respectable, based on a longitudinal ethnogra-
phy with 83 white working-class women. Sec-
ond, a collaborative ESRC research project1
on Violence, Sexuality and Space, currently
being undertaken and for which pilot research
began in 1997. The article is organised into
four sections. The first introduces the contem-
porary politics of recognition, the second and
third explore the constitution and theorising of
femininity, and the fourth draws on the empir-
ical data on tensions in toilets.
Thanks to Karen Corteen, Les Moran, and Paul Tyrer for
being excellent colleagues and for their enormous
contributions to the research project. Thanks also to the
WSN 1999 participants, Terry Lovell for inviting me to
speak at the conference, two searingly acute referees, other
respondents, and friends who have shared many toilet
experiences with me.
Recognition, both Nancy Fraser (1995, 1997)
and Charles Taylor (1994) argue, is the new
1990’s grammar for political claims-making.
Fraser (1995) identifies a shift from the politics
of redistribution (based on structural inequali-
ties, which often focus on class) to the politics of
recognition (based on what she defines as cul-
tural inequalities, and often centred on gender,
race, and sexuality2).
As Fraser argues, to be misrecognised:
. . . is not simply to be thought ill of, looked
down on, or devalued in others’ conscious at-
titudes or mental beliefs. It is rather to be de-
nied the status of full partner in social interac-
tion and prevented from participating as a
peer in social life—not as a consequence of a
distributive inequality (such as failing to re-
ceive one’s fair share of resources or “primary
goods”), but rather as a consequence of insti-
tutionalized patterns of interpretation and
evaluation that constitute one as compara-
tively unworthy of respect or esteem. When
such patterns of disrespect and disesteem are
institutionalized, for example, in law, social

295
296 Beverley Skeggs
welfare, medicine, and/or popular culture,
they impede parity of participation, just as
surely do distributive inequities. (1995, p. 280)
Mis-recognition is a continual dialogic pro-
cess in which we all participate to place others,
and hence, understand how to place ourselves,
and how to make relationships with others. It
is not just interpersonal; it has institutional ef-
fects. Patricia Williams (1991) shows how this
is particularly pertinent in law when groups
are constantly criminalised because they can-
not be recognised as anything other than
pathological. Taylor argues that “misrecogni-
tion can inflict harm, can be a form of oppres-
sion, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted
and reduced mode of being” (1994, p. 75).
To make a recognition is to participate in a
system of judgment and classification. It al-
ways involves evaluation, and as Berlant
(1997) argues, perhaps, pain:
Yet if the pain is at the juncture of you and
the stereotype that represents you, you know
that you are hurt not because of your rela-
tion to history but because of someone else’s
relation to it, a type of someone whose privi-
lege or comfort depends on the pain that di-
minishes you, locks you into identity, covers
you with shame, and sentences you to a hell
of constant political exposure to the banality
of derision . . . Pain thus organizes your spe-
cific experience of the world, separating you
from others and connecting you with others
similarly shocked (but not surprised) by the
strategies of violence that constantly regen-
erate the bottom of the hierarchies of social
value you inhabit. In this sense subaltern
pain is a public form because its outcome is
to make you readable, for others. (1997, p. 3)
So whilst recognition may enable claims for
justice, resources, and legitimation to be made,
mis-recognition fixes the subject in exclusion,
pathology, harm, and pain. To participate in rec-
ognition politics categories have to already exist
that have some sense of value and are inhabit-
able by those who are meant to occupy them.3
Being recognised as “something” has been
used by certain groups to mobilise claims for
political recognition. For instance, for the de-
bates on Multiculturalism in the United States,
see Goldberg (1994); gay politics, see Berlant
and Warner (1998) and transgender, see Hal-
berstam (1998). Wendy Brown (1995) argues
that these claims are usually framed within the
language of bourgeois individualism and inevi-
tably tied to formulations of identity politics.
Recognition politics has shifted the terrain in
terms of who can make political representa-
tions and be recognised as worthy of public le-
gitimation. This shift has also enabled dis-
courses of inequality to be replaced with those
of difference.
To be recognised is also dependent on the
symbolic systems of knowledge and evaluation
to which we have access and through which we
recognise others. These symbolic systems have
real effects on movements in social space, as
Bourdieu (1979, 1986, 1987, 1989) shows. For
the purposes of this paper, I will draw on
Bourdieu’s economistic metaphors to show
how the structure of this space is given by the
distribution of the various forms of “capital.”
He identifies four different types of capital,
economic, cultural, social, and symbolic:
1. Economic capital—includes income, wealth,
financial inheritances, monetary assets.
2. Cultural capital—this can exist in three forms:
in an embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-
lasting dispositions of the mind and the body
(such as corporeal capital); in the objectified
state, in the form of cultural goods; and in the
institutionalised state, resulting in such things
as educational qualifications.
3. Social capital—resources based on connec-
tions and group membership. This is capital
generated through relationships.
4. Symbolic capital—the form the different types
of capital take once they are perceived and
recognised as legitimate. Legitimation is the
key mechanism in the conversion to power.
Cultural capital has to be legitimated before it
can have symbolic power. Bourdieu argues
that women play a significant role in convert-
ing economic capital into symbolic capital
through the display of cultural taste (Fowler,
1997). All capitals are context specific.
Thus, people are distributed in the overall
social space according to: the global volume of
capital they possess; the composition of their
capital; the relative weight in their overall capi-
tal of the various forms of capital; and evolution
over time of the volume and composition ac-
cording to their trajectory in social space. This
model allows for an understanding of how bod-
ies have access to different amounts of capitals
 Femininity and Misrecognition
and embody certain dispositions. Bourdieu de-
velops the idea of movement through social
space by using the concept “habitus.” Lovell
(2000) argues that this is best described as a
“feel for the game” (p. 13), a “knowing how rather
than knowing that” (p. 12), in which the em-
bodied self always bears the marks of the start-
ing point and the ground covered along the way
(see also Fowler, 1997, and Reay, 1998).
The above model will now be used to in-
form a reading of femininity that combines the
perspectives of Bourdieu (1979, 1986, 1987,
1989) and Butler (1990, 1993, 1998, 1999).
Whilst the disagreements between these two
theorists can clearly be seen, there are ways in
which their analysis can be usefully combined:
see Lovell (2000), who argues that both theo-
rists utilise the same “conceptual toolkit,” and
Butler herself (1999), who suggests that the
“social” of Bourdieu and the “linguistic-per-
formative” of her own analysis may produce
similar effects. What is central to both, and to
this paper, is how certain performances be-
come legitimated and authorised, whether in-
stitutionally, discursively or through practice.4
Whilst Bourdieu’s focus is directed more to in-
stitutionally legitimated practice, Butler offers
the possibility for understanding how disrup-
tions to symbolic legitimation and textually
mediated discursive practices may produce al-
ternative forms of authorisation.
DOING FEMININITY
Femininity is the process through which
women are gendered and become specific
sorts of women. The process of becoming fem-
inine, Smith (1988) argues, occurs in the spaces
of textually mediated discourse, in the dialectic
between the active creating subject and the or-
ganisation of her activity in and by texts, pro-
duced in the interests of a wider global market.
The ability to engage in this dialectic is a mat-
ter of social positioning, access to texts, and
different forms of capital. Being, becoming,
practising, and doing femininity are very dif-
ferent things for women of different classes,
“races,” ages, and nations. The appearance of
femininity, i.e., the labour of looking feminine,
can also be distinguished from the labour of
feminine characteristics, such as caring, sup-
porting, passivity and nonassertiveness, al-
though the two are merged in the term “femi-
ninity.” Often these two different ways of
297
doing femininity are conflated in the reading
of the female body (Skeggs, 1997). The em-
phasis in this paper is on appearance and the
reading of it. Yet the method of reading
through appearance has historically attached
specific characteristics of personhood on the
basis of moral behaviour.
The assumption that working class women
are feminine and the simultaneous impossibility
of their ever being so has long historical roots.
For instance, Poovey (1984) charts how the
emergence of femininity as an ideal was pro-
duced through textuality in the 18th century
and the category of femininity generated had an
affinity with the habitus of the upper classes: of
ease, restraint, calm, and luxurious decoration.
It was a category of pure, white, heterosexual-
ity, later translated into the ideal for middle-
class women. Conduct books and magazines en-
capsulated this habitus with the concept of the
“lady” that equated conduct with appearance.
This mapping was in direct contrast to the
categorisation of working-class women who,
against the frailty of middle-class women, were
coded as inherently healthy, hardy, and ro-
bust—often masculinised—(whilst also, para-
doxically, a source of infection and disease).
Working-class women were also involved in
forms of labour that prevented femininity (ap-
pearance and characteristics) from ever being
a possibility. Thus, for working-class women,
femininity was never a given. Both black and
white working-class women were coded as the
sexual and deviant other against which femi-
ninity was defined (Gilman, 1992). Similarly,
Lynda Hart (1994) shows how when the cate-
gory lesbian entered discourse it did so
through an alignment with black, ethnic, and
white working-class women. Working-class
women were not expected to inhabit feminin-
ity in the same way as middle and upper-class
white women. Femininity was always some-
thing that did not designate them precisely: a
sign under which they could not and did not
belong. But their distance from it was a re-
quirement for the comfortable occupation of
femininity by others who had access to the
necessary economic and cultural resources.
The division between the sexual and the
feminine was most carefully coded at the level
of conduct, where appearance became the sig-
nifier of conduct; to look was to be. Appear-
ance became the means by which women were
categorised, known, and placed by others. Ap-
298 Beverley Skeggs
pearance operated as the mechanism for au-
thorisation, legitimation, and delegitimation.
Appearance became the mechanism for moral
evaluation: as Lury (1993) and Nead (1988)
show, too much attention to one’s appearance
was seen as a sign of sexual deviance, of sexu-
ality in excess: it was morally reprehensible.
Yvonne Tasker (1998) shows how this legacy
is still alive and kicking in contemporary Holly-
wood, where signifiers of obvious excessive at-
tention to appearance are used to denote low
moral value and potential disruption. She charts
a range of transformation narratives in which
the visually excessive working-class woman is
turned into the subtle and discreet middle-class
woman (usually by a powerful man, e.g., Work-
ing Girl, Pretty Woman, Up Close and Personal).
In the British version (Pygmalion/My Fair
Lady), attention is given to language as well as
appearance. In the transformation the audience
learn of the change through the gradual loss of
excessive style. Tasker argues that the attraction
of these films is the tension and pleasure gener-
ated by the risk of the women being exposed,
caught-out, and discovered and then ultimate re-
demption and escape. This encodes class as
something that has to be left behind, that which
is fixed for mobility to proceed and that which
has no value. These films also offer middle-class
taste as the mechanism by which working-class-
ness can be overcome and eradicated.
As Butler (1993) argues, femininity is a
mode of enacting and reenacting received gen-
der norms that surface as so many styles of the
flesh.5 Femininity is an achievement. It is also
an investment. It is one of the forms of cultural
capital to which working-class women (black
and white) have access.6
The interest the different classes have in self-
presentation, the attention they devote to it,
their awareness of the profit it gives and the
investment of time, effort, sacrifice, and care
that they actually put into it are proportion-
ate to the chances of material or symbolic
profit they can reasonably expect to see from
it. (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 202)
Subcultural research has explored the ways
in which attention to appearance and style are
the result of: creative solutions to blocked
chances; resistance to dominant ideology; a sub-
stitute for politics; responses to exclusion, alien-
ation, anomie; reaffirmation of wider inequali-
ties, and collective solutions to social exclusion
(McRobbie, 1978; McRobbie & Garber, 1976).
Femininity was used as a sign of collective be-
longing by the women in the Formations re-
search, used to gain some cultural currency or
to display cultural competence. Mercer (1987)
calls this “fronting out oppression by the artful
manipulation of appearances”:
Such dandyism is a feature of the economy of
style-statements in many subaltern class cul-
tures where “flashy” clothes are used in the
art of impression management to defy the as-
sumption that to be poor one necessarily has
to “show” it. (1987, p. 49)
The Formations research shows that femi-
ninity is used by working-class women as a
means of deflecting associations of pathology,
poverty, and pollution. Ironically, it is read of-
ten as just that. The mis-recognition of their
use of feminine artifacts and clothing shows
how different interpretative systems come into
play. The aesthetic production of themselves
can be seen as a way of generating a prosthetic
identity in which they attach and detach things,
such as clothing and attributes, to themselves
to deflect attention away from potentially neg-
ative readings (Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991).
Yet the historical-semiotic associations of femi-
ninity are so powerful that those with no
knowledge of working-class women often read
them as the opposite of what they are trying to
exclude from themselves.7 They may be read as
repositories of negative value, bad taste, and
culture (as objects rather than subjects) where,
in fact, they are strategically investing in them-
selves, attempting to convert their cultural into
economic capital (Lovell, 2000). It is, therefore,
both telling and surprising that it took middle-
class white feminist theorists so long to identify
femininity as a masquerade. As Carole Ann
Tyler (1991) argues, it is only from a middle-
class point of view that Dolly Parton looks like
a female impersonator (p. 57). Or, as Parton
(1994) ripostes: “It costs a lot of money to
make a person look this cheap” (p. 2).
Feminine appearance may be a “solution”
to lack of access to other routes of material se-
curity, or a means of deflecting class pathol-
ogy. Yet it can only be used by certain women.
Only those who have the right physicality to
accrue material and symbolic rewards. And
even for those in the Formations research who
 Femininity and Misrecognition
could “do” the appearance of femininity, it
was often seen as a structuring inconvenience,
something that was difficult for them to avoid
completely. They put on the appearance of
femininity when it was necessary and did not
bother when it was not. Femininity was thus a
spatial and temporal matter, and those that did
it in the wrong place or at the wrong time were
severely chastised.
When the women of the Formations re-
search did make investments in femininity it
was not through identification, or by comfort-
ably inhabiting the category of femininity. They
did it because they had to; it was a cultural im-
perative. It was used in a variety of ways: as sur-
vival, as hope in a future, as creative—a display
of their cultural competence and skill, as fun, as
a mechanism for enjoying time together. They
learned to temporarily occupy the position to
which they did not belong. Their take up of
femininity always had a material base. They
also had few alternatives to femininity. When
you have restricted access to small amounts of
capitals, femininity may be better than nothing
at all. Investments in femininity can accrue rela-
tively high profit in some arenas (the institu-
tions of marriage and heterosexuality), whilst
being simultaneously devalued in others (the la-
bour market, the education system). Although
it may sometimes be a valuable commodity in
the secondary labour market, where attention
to appearance, caring and servicing are neces-
sary, such jobs are usually limited to the less
permanent, less well-paid sectors of the labour
market (see Adkins, 1995; Hochschild, 1983).
Advertising, magazines, and other forms of cul-
tural representation that promote concern and
anxiety over appearance have relatively low
cultural value and, as Ann Cronin (2000) shows
in relation to European advertising, femininity
as a sign of appearance has remained relatively
fixed whilst masculinity has become “ironic.”
In the Formations research, feminine ap-
pearance had a high value in the local ex-
change-value mechanism and a very low value
in the national symbolic conversion rate. The
women were allocated by a variety of different
cultural custodians (family, school, kinship
networks) to take up the appearance and be-
haviour of femininity. But what was absolutely
central to all of the women’s different takes on
doing femininity was that they rarely took it
seriously and, just as they dis-identified from
class to prove their respectability, they simi-
299
larly dis-identified from femininity. They were
aware of the different restrictions on the value
that it held. There were also other far more im-
portant characteristics to identify with, such as
being hard, independent, and strong; these
could be combined with feminine appearance
but not behaviour. Moreover, the historical
discursive location of femininity would make it
very difficult for a working-class woman to
ever BE feminine (that is, to have femininity
as subjectivity). Their femininity was both a
performance (a conscious enactment) and per-
formative (a reiterated practice).8
FEMINIST QUEER CRITIQUES
Femininity has created specific problems for
feminist and queer theorists. Lynda Hart
(1998) argues that in lesbian/queer culture/
writing it is often assumed that the femme (the
lesbian embodiment of femininity) is “invisi-
ble” without the presence of the butch. In
other words, she argues, it is the butch’s visibil-
ity that brings the femme into focus as a
femme. Otherwise, she disappears into the op-
tical field occupied by heterosexual women.
There is always, Butler (1998) argues, the prior
assumption that every visible form of feminin-
ity is straight until proven otherwise.
Biddy Martin (1996) notes how recent ef-
forts to introduce desire into the definition of
lesbianism and distance it from imperatives to
identify with and as women have cast (femi-
nine) gender as mere masquerade or as a con-
straint to be escaped, overridden, or left aside
as the more radical work of queering the world
proceeds. Sexuality is cast as that which offers
the potential of superseding gender, leaving
femininity behind. It is, Martin argues, the
fixed space from which all others can move
(signified by Female-To-Male or Trans-sexual-
ity: see Halberstam (1998) for category de-
bate). In the F-T-M project femininity is always
fixed, but fixed centrally in heterosexuality.
Sexuality is often the mechanism by which the
crossing occurs and masculine positions be-
come the emblem of mobility. She argues “that
we stop defining queerness as mobile and fluid
in relation to what gets construed as stagnant
and ensnaring . . .” (1996, p. 46).
The antifoundationalist celebrations of
queerness rely on their own projections of fix-
ity, constraint, or subjection onto a fixed
ground. These projections are often feminism,
300 Beverley Skeggs
but as feminism has already fixed the feminine,
it becomes doubly fixed as that which is the ab-
solute immovable object (or static subject posi-
tion). Femininity is fixed so that others can
travel. They can move into other genders (mas-
culinity) or they can become “enlightened”
through visiting feminism. In this analysis gen-
der is assumed to constitute the ultimate
ground of women’s experience, producing what
Eve Sedgwick (1991) identifies as the “injunc-
tion to identify.” Martin (1996) argues that
when femininity is played straight, that is, when
it is not camped up or disavowed, it is seen to
constitute a “capitulation, a swamp, something
maternal, ensnared and ensnaring” (1996, p.
46). It is the visual, she argues, that enables the
differences to be known, to be seen. Surface
and appearance constitute the ground for judg-
ments, bringing into play the prior historical
discursive alignment that appearance  con-
duct and now  subjectivity  truth. But be-
cause appearance is always produced on the
body, in femininity, the body is read as truth.
Christine Holmlund (1993) notes how the
femme lesbian, along with the butch clone and
the passing Black person, are signs of a refusal
of the reduction of the body to a sign of truth.
By disrupting the heterosexual matrix and re-
versing its connections, the femme lesbian
blocks easy readability. This is why the femme
has always been a problem in lesbian bars, as
documented by Joan Nestle (1987), who shows
how femmes are usually read with suspicion (as
Butler suggested earlier) and through hetero-
sexuality; a potential collusion with the enemy.
For those who have distanced themselves from
heterosexuality, femmes are a reminder that
other moves are possible, and that appearance
may be just another conscious performance.
Femmes make explicit the gendered mecha-
nisms of exchange and value involved in sexu-
ality (explicitly not heterosexuality) through in-
vestment in the corporeal schema. Yet what is
often ignored in the recent feminist queer cri-
tiques is that this exchange mechanism is firmly
anchored in class; a point well made by earlier
lesbian analysis (e.g., Lapovsky Kennedy &
Davis, 1993; Nestle, 1987).
APPEARANCE AS JUDGMENT
There is, therefore, a serious problem with the
mis-recognition of the feminine whereby inter-
pretation is based on appearance. The visual
economy of a historically, raced, classed hetero-
sexuality is often invoked when reading femi-
nine-adorned bodies but is not acknowledged.
Rather, it is read as a characteristic of the per-
son. This is apparent in our recent Violence,
Sexuality and Space research project. This re-
search is funded for 30 months by the ESRC
(Economic and Social Research Council) as
part of the Violence Initiative. In this research
we investigate how commercial gay space (the
“gay village” in Manchester, UK) enables or
constrains the production of sexual identifica-
tions. The “gay village” is a strongly marked
space displaying banners, posters, road signs,
and flyers. It has recently been institutionalized
in the 1999 UK Channel 4 TV programme
Queer as Folk, which represents the space as
some sort of gay-male utopia. In fact, the space
is consistently represented as gay male. There is
one lesbian bar, Vanilla on the road behind the
main street, Canal Street. We are researching
the way three different groups—gay men, lesbi-
ans, and straight women—use the space, and we
are contrasting this with an investigation of an-
other UK city—Lancaster—in which there is no
gay space available. We are studying straight
women because previous research I conducted
(Skeggs, 1997) showed that straight white work-
ing-class women use gay space to protect them-
selves against violence, unremitting heterosex-
ual male attention, and constant scrutiny and
judgment. A census survey of the village we
conducted on a Friday in February 1999 showed
that out of a total of 703 respondents, 35%
(245) identified as gay men, 19% (135) as lesbi-
ans, 19% (133) as straight women, 13% as
straight men, 3% (20) as bi-women, 4% (24) as
bi-men, 3% (23) as other.
The following extracts from the research
are generated from the Manchester and Lan-
caster lesbian and straight women’s focus
groups (six of each group in total). The re-
search has used crossfertilisation, feeding in-
formation from each group to the other to in-
terrogate different perspectives. This first
extract is from the first “Seedcorn” lesbian fo-
cus group held in 1997:
C: . . . the only problems that I’ve ever had in
places like Paradise (gay male club) or sort
of now really at Manto (urban regeneration
gay bar) is from straight women, there’s al-
ways straight women at those places and they
do look at you, like if you go to the toilet.
 Femininity and Misrecognition
M: Yes. And when you’re in a toilet queue
and you’ve got all these women with like big
platform shoes and little short skirts and
loads of make-up, and you just, but you do
really feel like you’re in a minority in the toi-
let queue and you feel that you, you sort of . . .
I immediately feel like really masculine,
loads bigger than them, loads fatter than
them, obviously I’m not fat at all, but you
know they’re all like anorexic, they probably
take too many drugs or whatever. And you
just feel really, you feel really invaded in
your own space and they can’t wait to get out
again to be with the gay male friends who
they think they’re really safe with.
J: I was stood in the queue at Manto, I was
watching one of those little micro skirted
girls and every lesbian that came out was like
with their head down, oh you know . . .
Wouldn’t dream of looking. Sort of like, just
felt like, you know, just trying to take up as
little space as possible. This is a gay space
and yet these women.
M: I know like putting hair in your face.9
Elsewhere I’ve argued that the sense of se-
curity straight women generate from occupy-
ing gay space creates insecurity and displace-
ment for others, primarily lesbians (Skeggs,
1999). But here I want to use these extracts to
concentrate on how appearance constitutes
the basis for reading, knowing, and categoriz-
ing, whereby bodies of other women become
fixed as the site of the truth of a person, rather
than a class based relationship. It is the ap-
pearance of femininity that makes some
women identifiable as THE problem, the dis-
ruption to spatial claims based on sexuality.
Yet it is not just lesbians who declare their dis-
tance and dis-investments from feminine ap-
pearance and who feel disrupted by these vi-
sions of excess. Investments in feminine
appearance can be just as irritating and op-
pressive to other less-invested Manchester
straight women. The above comments were
read out to the straight women’s focus group
(June, 1999), and this is just a small selection
of the heated debate that ensued:
Ruth: I can appreciate how they feel because
I was just thinking about various occasions in
toilets where you know the three women who
301
are in there have been there for the last ten
minutes and they’re re-doing make up and
re-doing their hair and they’re talking about
all the blokes and I go in there and go to the
toilet and look in the mirror and think oh my
god I’ve got black eyes, wipe it off, and I go
out and think my god, that is what is impor-
tant to them and they are preening them-
selves . . . (all interrupt). On the one hand I
can say that’s slightly oppressive to me, right?
Elsa: No. If there’s only one I won’t even
look in the mirror.
Ruth: No, no, it’s just an idea because I’m
not like that and on the other hand I find it
laughable, so on those two levels I think I
can appreciate how a lesbian woman feels
because it’s like they are making such an ef-
fort to look their best.
Elsa: What’s wrong with that?
Ruth: Because it looks like it’s the most impor-
tant thing in the world to them. I go out with
my friends and I go out and have a good time.
Elsa: But that’s you and they’re happy like that.
Huge argument—all shouting not transcrib-
able.
Ruth: It’s oppressive in some respects and
laughable because I wouldn’t want to be like
that, but on the other hand I think my god
I’ve got to be like that to attract men.
Sue: What you’re attracting is opposite to
what they’re attracting.
Ruth: Yes, but I can appreciate how it can be
oppressive.
Marina: Don’t you think it’s funny. I can
laugh at these girls. They can go into a night-
club and spend the whole night in the toilets
instead of being on the dance floor enjoying
themselves.
Ruth: Yes, but they take over the toilets,
don’t they. They take over.
Elsa: But it doesn’t matter.
Marina: They can have the smelly old toilets.
302 Beverley Skeggs
The discussion signals and reproduces both
the distance drawn from and the devaluation
of the feminine; only Elsa questions the dis-
tinctions that are being drawn. The concern
with appearance, which, as studies of working-
class women show, is central to the attempts to
secure economic and symbolic capital (Skeggs,
1997; Steedman, 1986; Walkerdine, 1989,
1990), is paradoxically perceived as an enact-
ment of entitlement that delegitimates the
presence of others. But feminine appearance is
also invoked here as something to be pitied.
The women are read as both sad and dominat-
ing. It is these contradictions that contain the
contemporary evaluations and readings of
femininity. Femininity is paradoxical, it occu-
pies a space of symbolic legitimation via cor-
poreal capital but then is also delegitimated as
an investment. It is not insignificant that this
focus group is comprised predominantly of
working-class women who have a high quo-
tient of middle-class cultural capital (according
to the earlier Bourdieuian schema) and who
have drawn a distance throughout the research
from other women whom they identify as
Cheshire or Piccadilly 21 types (both terms be-
ing used to signify “high” femininity and “low”
taste or a lack of cultural capital).
Whilst noting that the women who appear
feminine are assumed to be heterosexual and
also that they are read through devalued class
signifiers of excess (big hair, short skirts, lots of
make-up), what is surprising here is the power
that the normative feminine invokes. It gener-
ates comparisons and self-judgment (of fat,
masculinity, etc.) and provokes embodied feel-
ings of shame (head held down). This is the lan-
guage of evaluation and those who appear fem-
inine are authorized and granted the power (in
this small space) to evaluate others. This is a
surprising authorization for those who inhabit a
category—femininity—that has so little wider
symbolic value. Paradoxically, those who are
providing the authorization for femininity are
also those who have chosen not to invest in it.
Interestingly, it is the straight women who offer
less authority to femininity, although some are
still made to feel out of place by its enactment.
How femininity is evaluated and put into ef-
fect through visual evaluation is explored by
the Lancaster straight women’s focus group:
Vanessa: And toilets are a place where
you’re either in a queue, so you’re getting
stared at or watched or you’re being looked
up and down ‘cos that’s all there is to do.
You’re just stood there. There’s nothing else
to do (vocal agreement from the rest of the
group) and I can’t say I don’t stand there and
look people up and down, not out of being . . .
It’s just habit. What else is there to do when
you’re stood there waiting for the toilet?
Jacqui: It’s the fact you’ve been stuck there
and there is nothing else to do. It’s like the
Satre play where they’re all stood round
looking at each other.
Vanessa: Yes but if you rushed in and there
was a cubicle you’d be in that toilet and out
and that would be it. You know, if someone
oh said “come on who’s in there what’s she
dressed like” you wouldn’t be able to tell.
The woman who’s stood there waiting, you
know, you’re eyeing all these women up.
She’s like what she’s got on and that.
Toilets heighten the sensitivity to appear-
ance because looking is one of the main things
to do when standing in a queue. Different toi-
lets (at different events) provoke different lev-
els of scrutiny and generate different authori-
zations, as Carol notes:
Carol: When you went to Gutter Girls
(Women-only, lesbian organized event in
Lancaster) there was always a massive queue.
There were only two toilets and so someone
would say “stuff this” we’ll all go to the gents.
And we’d all go together. Or we’d all be
standing there in a queue laughing and joking
and saying “mind you don’t slip.” The frig-
ging water would be up to your ankles, which
it usually was, or the carpet would be over-
flowing with toilet paper. There would always
be something to chat about. Different writing
on the wall since I was here last time. People
would make a joke and things like that.
Bev: Was that ‘cos it was a different environ-
ment, you know it was a women-only event?
Carol: Completely different yes. You felt dif-
ferent. I don’t know, you just felt more at
ease it was as if people were not competing
with one another. I think in a straight place
you get loads of women doing themselves up
competing with each other to get back out
 Femininity and Misrecognition
there and chat the blokes up. And even if
you’ve got a partner you still feel . . . awk-
ward. Whereas it’s always as if you have to
try to keep up with them or compete with
them, whatever. And people sometimes look
down their nose at you because of what
you’re wearing or you’ve got tattoos, or nose
studs and things like that (older people espe-
cially). But in Gutter Girls it didn’t matter,
there was all different age groups from
young ‘uns, those who’d just left school, to
really older ones with children. Nobody gave
a toss, everybody was chatting, there was al-
ways something to chat about, no matter
what it was you could always have a chat.
So why doesn’t a toilet in a gay space feel
this comfortable? They can be equally horrific
in terms of overflow and there is usually plenty
to chat about. Partly, I’d argue it is less comfort-
able because of the threat of heterosexuality in
a gay space. Our research has consistently pro-
duced narratives of invasion, swamping, and
take-over, signifying the vulnerability of the
space (Tyrer, 1999). But I’d also argue that pre-
dominantly gay male clubs (to which the lesbian
focus group earlier referred) are strongly orga-
nized around a scopic economy of visual bodily
evaluation (there’s nothing like a group of camp
queens in the women’s toilet in a gay club to
provide a stunningly witty and scathing critique
of appearance). In the combination of taste and
space a particular exchange value and authori-
zation is produced. The gay male space gener-
ates authorization for youthful physicality (cor-
poreal capital) alongside an attribution of value
and authorization of the feminine; a category
only known and brought into effect through its
binary opposition to masculinity. Also, I’d sug-
gest the “women of excess” bring a visual re-
minder of hierarchies within markets of corpo-
real capital, markets that also operate within
lesbian culture (even if slightly modified).
Even though there is a repetitive symbolic
devaluation and trivializing of the feminine,
this cultural capital schema works alongside
others that may recuperate the concern with
appearance in different ways. It is not insignifi-
cant that one of the toilets cited in the Village
as the most intimidating is in a well-known bar
frequented by Manchester United (and less
glamorous) footballers and models, who repre-
sent a potential entry ticket into a glamorous
and wealthy life.
303
Whilst attention to appearance is devalued
as a trivial pursuit, we are all part of a scopic
economy of bodily capital assessment whereby,
regardless of sexuality, we enter and know our
positioning in relation to others via their bodily
and visual value. Physical (or bodily) capital is
another way of systematically organising dis-
tinctions. Physical capital is known through the
corporeal evaluations based on age, size, stan-
dardization, hardness, symmetry, etc., before
the body is dressed. Some bodies are evaluated
as wearing their clothes better than others (e.g.,
super models are partly chosen for their ability
to let clothes hang). These constant corporeal
assessments, Bourdieu (1986) argues, are al-
ways a matter of taste:
Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that
is embodied, helps to shape the class body. It
is an incorporated principle of classification
which governs all forms of incorporation,
choosing and modifying everything that the
body ingests and digests and assimilates,
physiologically and psychologically. It fol-
lows that the body is the most indisputable
materialization of class taste, which it mani-
fests in several ways. It does this first in the
seemingly most natural features of the body,
the dimensions (volume, height, weight) and
shapes (round or square, stiff or supple,
straight or curved) of its visible forms, which
express in countless ways a whole relation to
the body, i.e., a way of treating it, caring for
it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveal the
deepest dispositions of the habitus. (Bour-
dieu, 1986, p. 190)
The body, Bourdieu argues, is the most tan-
gible manifestation of the “person.” The natu-
ral is highly valued, the adorned is a sign of low
morality, and, “in matters of taste, more than
anywhere else, all determination is negation;
tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes”
(1986, p. 56). The bodies of the “women of ex-
cess” carry the legacies of the past. Their inter-
est in appearance is read as immoral and as a
matter of bad and vulgar taste. Historical class
positioning is read as individualized volition, a
matter of taste.
What may also be significant is the loca-
tion—toilets—and, in particular, the centrality
of the mirror. Toilets, as Sally Munt (1998) and
Judith Halberstam (1998) have argued, are un-
comfortable liminal zones where gender is
304 Beverley Skeggs
tested and proved. They are local arenas for
the use and trading of cultural capital and they
are dangerous places where failed womanhood
is reflected and, as Munt argues, for the butch
dyke the failure to achieve masculinity is dis-
played. The mirror confirms whether or not
the appearance is convincing; if gender is in
place. But it also confirms one’s value and
one’s place in the corporeal schema. Putting
make-up on in public in front of a mirror is a
statement of investment in gender norms. It is
making explicit one’s desire to have corporeal
value. This is why it is often read as a state-
ment of vanity:
Marina: It’s vanity as well isn’t it. You’re al-
ways afraid to look in the mirror as well
aren’t you. I was going I don’t want to look
around.
Zoe: Some girls are totally confident about
putting their make up on in the mirror with
loads of other women but you just think oh
God, she’s dead vain isn’t she, you know, you
don’t want to be seen being vain, do we?
Elsa: Well I don’t think it’s vain. I just think
better not go out there, do you know what I
mean? You have to check yourself before
you go out.
Elsa draws attention to the fine line be-
tween public humiliation (for instance, if your
skirt is tucked into your knickers, as wonder-
fully represented in the BBC comedy Abso-
lutely Fabulous) and the morally devalued “ex-
cessive” concern with appearance. Overt
concern with appearance can be read as a sign
of moral worthlessness, of vanity, of tasteless-
ness. Yet the mirror is also a paradoxical (in a
gay space) and constant reminder of the value
of feminine appearance. To keep the head
down, as documented by J earlier, serves to
avoid the mirror as well as the excessive
women, but also makes a statement of a lack of
concern with appearance, a distance from femi-
ninity, from heterosexuality, a refusal to invest
in feminine authority, a refusal to be judged by
those who have temporary (and rare) symbolic
authority. So the authority is simultaneously
acknowledged in a refusal to be judged by it.
Why should one’s concern with appearance
be so significant as a measure of the self? Is it
just a matter of taste? Is it a recognition of our
place in the physical taxonomy of evaluation?
Is it a reflection of our losses and lack (the per-
fect body, the symmetrical face, the embodi-
ment of desire)? The young women of excess
represent a (temporary, fleeting) moment in a
woman’s life where she may feel good about
herself and the confidence this may bring may
be terrifying to others (try going out for the
night in public with a group of beautiful young
women). It is a limited form of spurious au-
thority. To invest in her body as the hope for
the future (or to try and retain that hope
through comments such as “not letting go;”
Skeggs, 1997) is a large and insecure invest-
ment for a woman to make: bodies are unpre-
dictable. Value is always temporal, for, as Sta-
cey (1994) argues, there are time limits on the
value of femininity: it decreases with age.
What the toilet exchanges suggest is the power
of easy readability, where knowing is equated
with looking, where the body is read as truth,
and where the attempt to disassociate one con-
cern with appearance from another is always
trapped in the scopic economy of visual evalu-
ation. This evaluation is locked into differently
valued systems of symbolic capital that at-
tribute exchange value, enabling some bodies
to be authorized and not others.
CONCLUSION
There are two types of recognition presented
in this article.10 First, there is the Fraser and
Taylor type of politics of recognition, in which
certain bodies are read, through their appear-
ance (and dispositions) as having no value.
They are, therefore, unable to access certain
forms of capital and are limited in the ways in
which they can utilize the capital which they
possess. This is one of the processes that oc-
curs in the toilets where symbolic delegitima-
tion occurs through the reading of the excess, a
textually mediated class-based discourse, in
which the feminine appearance in the toilet
corresponds to wider capital evaluations. The
Formations research showed how these types
of reading, which are readily institutionalized,
produced daily suffering, humiliation, and pain
(as earlier described by Berlant) and also set
limits on the value of embodied capital and,
therefore, on the ability to move through so-
cial space and access other forms of capital.
Second, mis-recognition in Bourdieu’s
sense occurs when symbolic capital has been
 Femininity and Misrecognition
acquired by a successful act of legitimation,
which itself veils the social processes and struc-
tures that are necessary to existence, so femi-
ninity is read as a natural or individualized
personality disposition. This mis-recognizes
the structural and historical formation of femi-
ninity, in which working-class women are posi-
tioned as immoral and tasteless because of
their concern with appearance, one of the only
forms of cultural capital on which they can
draw. In the toilets, excessive femininity is
read as a sign of the truth of the person. The
appearance of femininity in a gay male space
simultaneously produces the first and second
mis-recognitions.
Paradoxically, however, mis-recognition au-
thorizes femininity in a very limited way. The
appearance of femininity has a very limited
symbolic value in a binary gendered world in
which power and domination are organized
through masculinity. Yet in a women-only
space the hierarchies within gender become
apparent and these are organized through the
structure of the heterosexual matrix, which is
held in place by the mirror, the queue, and the
invite to gendered bodily inspection. The fact
that the gay space is signified as male repro-
duces the authority given to masculinity, so
that the matrix is not significantly disrupted.
This is why the experiences at the Gutter Girl
women-only, lesbian organized events in Lan-
caster were so different. Although not strongly
spatialised and territorialized as a gay space,
no authority was given in the space to mascu-
linity. As long as the gay space is signified, of-
ten via commercial imperatives, as male,
young and/or mixed, the masculine dominated
heterosexual matrix will remain authorized.
The temporary and spatially limited authoriza-
tion of femininity is enabled by the value given
to youthful physicality and glamour, which
corresponds with the heterosexual matrix to
enable femininity to operate as a very limited
form of cultural capital. It is given a temporary
value in the toilet in a gay male space.
However, this process is not entirely
straightforward. As feminist queer theorists
suggest, the femme is a disruptive presence.
She disrupts the possibility of easy reading and
placement. But she is also a corporeal re-
minder of all investments in appearances and
bodies. Creed (1995) shows how certain ap-
pearances work as signs of authority in lesbian
bars. So feminine appearance is mis-recogn-
305
ised, is authorized, and is a reminder of the
evaluations that are read from the body. This
is, I’d argue, why femininity is always read
straight. Every act of fixing femininity in het-
erosexuality, of reading straight, is to evoke a
class based, gender-only analysis. It is also to
make invisible the restricted access to different
forms of capital imposed on certain groups of
women, making invisible the labour and social
relations that underpin the imperatives and
necessity for particular forms of femininity.
This paper, therefore, concludes by arguing
that we need to pay more attention to issues of
space and taste in the making and reproduc-
tion of gender and sexuality. The paradoxes of
the specifics of the symbolic economy, the val-
ues that it establishes, the processes by which
legitimation occur, all rely on putting into ef-
fect judgments and evaluations that are invari-
ably class based, dependent on access to capi-
tals, to alternatives, to other forms of plausibility.
To ignore the underpinnings of class, from
which readings of the feminine cannot be di-
vorced (the process of becoming and reading
the feminine is a class process), is to put into
effect and legitimate the two damaging and
dangerous forms of mis-recognition that fix
and hold in symbolic and social space those
who already have only limited access to differ-
ent capitals and to make sure that their future
access to mobility remains restricted.
ENDNOTES
1. See http://les1.man.ac.uk/sociology/vssrp.
2. See the debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith But-
ler in Social Text (1997) 52/53(15), 3–4.
3. Lisa Bower (1997) shows how in the U.S. claims for
recognition have taken a legal form, what she names as
“official recognition.”
4. In Formations of Class and Gender I show how these the-
orists can be woven through with Foucault. This analysis
is indebted to an Althussarian legacy that Butler (1999)
suggests is also present in her and Bourdieu’s work.
5. Bartky (1990) defines femininity as self-objectification,
alienation, shaming, undermining self-esteem, disci-
plinary labour, the internalization of pervasive intima-
tions of inferiority, and ultimately feminine masochism.
6. Black and white femininity are by no means aligned.
Historically both Black and white working class women
were designated as sexual, thereby not feminine.
Angela Davis (1995) argues that this has had a radical
impact on the formation of Black women’s subjectivity.
7. This is not to assume a core or real self from which one
moves in and out. As Munro (1996) argues, there is no
movement of return (to the self) but only a circulation
from figure to figure, one figure picking up on what the
other excludes; hence, we are always in extension.
306 Beverley Skeggs
8. It is important here not to confuse the performative with
performance. “Performativity must not be understood as
a singular ‘act’ but rather, as the reiterative and citational
practice by which discourse produces the effects that it
names . . . the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a perfo-
mative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and,
more specifically, to materialise the body’s sex, to materi-
alise sexual difference in the service of the consolidation
of the heterosexual imperative” (Butler, 1993, p. 2).
9. Because these quotes are from the pilot (Seedcorn)
research we have anonymised the participants. In the
focus groups of the main research project participants
were asked to choose their own pseudonyms, which are
used here.
10. Thanks to Bridget Fowler, the prominent feminist Bour-
dieuan scholar, for making these distinctions apparent.
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