Sublime

Our identities are too often defined by our relationships to other people—wife, mother, daughter—and prominent politicians defend women’s rights by describing us relationally to men.

(It’s arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.)