It’s a uniform. The only thing that worries me is remembering whether I wore that shirt or sweater too recently to wear again.

Of course, all of these anxieties are heightened in a culture that seems increasingly obsessed with feminine appearance (Who Wore it Best? in Us Weekly, What Not to Wear on TLC, the Go Fug Yourself ladies, etc.) Being a scholar of media and popular culture amplifies it further, as we can’t pretend we don’t know about that culture because our heads are too buried in books.

Finally, I understand Megan’s ambivalence about embodying an overt femininity. I try to work on the assumption that what I say and write gives me both authority and feminist cred and that any more conventionally feminine style I might embrace (clearly, I am Anthro obsessed) allows me to refuse a feminine/feminist binary. I think the key is the decoupling of how one looks and who one is, what one thinks, how one stands politically. I think insisting on that decoupling, insisting that neither is determining of the other, is vital. For me, refusing to reject the feminine simply for being feminine is central to that project.

That said, I think that only a style blog that wholly rejected the products of the mainstream market could justifiably stand in protest against the conditions of production for such retailers. I’m sure such blogs exist and would be great reads. Ultimately, I am most interested in exploring the ways that the women of these blogs, whether avowedly feminist or not, actively negotiate their relationship to this dominant culture, as so few of us are able or willing to reject it in total.