Theatre is often reduced to performance. An actor memorizes lines, puts on a costume, and inhabits a life long enough to make it convincing. We tend to assume that is what makes it theatrical: the act of becoming someone else. But performance is only one part of it.
A theatre also has a director, a script, critics, rehearsals, and an audience. It is, in essence, an institution built around visibility. Nothing in it means much until someone is there to witness it.
Femininity works the same way.
Not merely as performance, but as an existence continually arranged around spectatorship.
I felt it countless times. I felt that before I had words for it.
I was in a theatre with my family, waiting for the lights to go down, knees apart, when my mother leaned over.
“Girls don’t sit like that,” she said, gently.
She wasn’t angry. The correction came wrapped in concern. I knew what she meant: close my knees and take up less space. So, I did.
The play hadn’t even started, and I had already been reviewed.
We talk about femininity as something a woman simply has, a natural pull towards softness and grace, as if it grew out of the body unprompted. But nobody walks onto a stage already knowing the script. A girl learns hers through correction.
Sometimes from her close ones, sometimes from strangers. She learns which emotions make her too much and which make her agreeable. Her anger is unbecoming, but her empathy must be limitless.
She is told that her confidence is only admirable to a certain extent; that must stop once it begins to resemble authority. She is taught that beauty is rewarded not because it reveals character, but because it reassures an audience.
Over time they pile up, and one day the rehearsal stops feeling like a rehearsal. It feels like instinct.
That is ideology’s best trick: repetition passes for nature.
But performance alone cannot sustain theater. It requires an audience.
It needs someone to watch the fall.
The audience never needs to say a word. The actress fixes her posture because she knows she’s being watched. She hears the applause before it comes and the criticism before it’s spoken.
Girls learn this in the doorway, before they’ve entered any room.
Is my orna in the right place? Is my hair okay? Is this too much blush?
Checking what their bodies might be saying about them.
Under a watchful gaze, femininity does not bloom--it shrivels. The gaze arrives long before the observer. And at one stage, it no longer matters whether anyone has stayed to watch--the eyes, they’ve turned inwards.
Feminism named this long before it had language sophisticated enough to describe it: surveillance, prolonged enough, becomes self-surveillance.
The critic never leaves the theatre; he leaves his gaze in his old seat. And that is enough.
Maybe that’s why debates about femininity so often collapse into the question of choice, mistaking the structure for the performance. The interesting question is not whether the actress enjoys her costume, but whether she chose the stage at all.
Agency and structure are not opposites. A woman can be soft, kind, and forgiving. She can love dresses and flowers and lipstick, and none of it makes her smaller.
Those pleasures are real, even if they live inside a culture that rewards them.
Expectation doesn’t cancel out desire, and desire doesn’t make expectation disappear.
Both can be true at once. The two can coexist.
That is where femininity is most often misunderstood. Feminism isn’t suspicious of it because it is artificial.
Everything human is constructed to some extent:Language, law, nations. That doesn’t make any of it less significant.
What feminism questions is not the performance but the conditions under which it becomes compulsory. A role stops being expressive the moment leaving it is punished.
Perhaps that is what separates theatre from captivity.
In a theatre, the curtain always falls.
The actor takes off the costume, the audience goes home, and the role stays behind on the stage where it belongs.
Femininity has never given women that. It follows them off the stage and into mirrors, classrooms, relationships, every photograph ever taken, every family dinner ever sat through.
The stage follows them home, then one day it becomes home.
That’s why it can be exhausting even when you love it, even when you chose it. Not because it’s fake, but because there is no intermission.
I have a niece who is one. She can’t walk yet, and she has no opinion about colours. I wanted to buy her a doll, and I was scrolling through gifts marked “for
girls” before I even noticed. Then I stopped.
When did I start looking in this aisle? Why not a ball? A toy car? Why was I already steering her world towards pink?
Maybe feminism’s most radical move was never to tear down the theatre. Maybe it was to imagine a world where the actress can walk off the stage and still be recognized as herself.
Until then, the script keeps travelling, not through villains but through the people who love us. And through us.
Shuchi Binte Shahjalal is a writer who writes gently, honestly, and just a little dangerously about love and home.