“Any cosmo girl would’ve known”: Collaboration,feminine knowledge,and Femme theory in Legally Blonde

Abstract

In 2001, the film Legally Blonde was released into a pop cultural landscape saturated with the Spice Girls’ brand of feminism-lite and postfeminist media texts like Sex and the City (1998–2004). With its firm hold on “girlie” feminism, Legally Blonde is postfeminist — but not post-femme. I extend the claim that femme theory can be located in low-cultural spaces and texts to understand the “chick flick” as another possible site of femme theory. I argue that Legally Blonde demonstrates that femme resistance can be located in the success of femininity, rather than only in its failure.

Introduction: What’s femme about Legally Blonde?

In 2001, femmes scarcely existed in mainstream media. On the tails of the TV show Ellen’s history-making butch lead, but still years away from the femme bomb set off by The L Word, there were virtually no femme characters on screen. Enter the fictional Elle Woods: Legally Blonde’s white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender, young heroine with an impeccable high femme aesthetic whose camping-up of Harvard Law has, so far, inspired law school hopefuls and captivated queer audiences for 20 years. Though Elle does not claim the identifier femme, her story is familiar to those who present femininely. Despite her socioeconomic privileges, Elle’s feminine gender presentation, flirtatious sexuality, and ostensibly frivolous pastimes seemed to disqualify her from serious or intellectual pursuits in the eyes of her peers, family, and society at large. In the movie that made her an icon, Elle endeavors to retain her femininity and prove her smarts. The film was produced in the ideological context of postfeminism, which gave way to a redefinition of femininity; girls and women could now be—and should be—both sexy and strong, pretty and successful. Third-wave feminism and femme theory were contemporaneous to this new paradigm, and were also invested in inciting a redefinition and revolution of femininity, albeit with different motives in mind. In this paper, I explore the entanglement of postfeminism and femme theory in Legally Blonde, arguing that the film espouses key concepts and methods of femme theory while making a successful case for its expansion.

Femme theory shares some principles with both feminist and queer theory. Through her extensive work on femmephobia, Hoskin (2017, 2019a) has argued that femininity ought to be considered and taken seriously in intersectional analyses of oppression. Other conceptualizations of femme theory have centered knowledge production and form (Schwartz, 2018; Dahl, 2011). Following the example of queer theory, I have elsewhere argued that femme theory not only attends to femme subjects, but challenges the masculinist standard of inquiry by (1) questioning the hierarchy of “high” and “low” theory; (2) challenging femmephobia; and, (3) utilizing collaborative methods (Schwartz, 2018). I argue that Legally Blonde is a femme media text, not because it is representative of femme subjects, but because the narrative is demonstrative of these principles of femme theory.

Femme is a queer identity with roots in working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as drag and ball culture originating in the 1960s (Bailey, 2014; Nestle, 1992). In femme literature published since the 1990s, femme has been understood as a queer sexuality or sexual style, (e.g., Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Cvetkovich, 2003; Dahl, 2017; Nestle, 1992); a queer and subversive gender expression (e.g., Brushwood Rose and Camilleri, 2002; Duggan and McHugh, 1996; Walker, 2012); and a figure of political resistance that moves between normative and subversive signifiers (Galewski, 2005; Hemmings, 1999; Hoskin and Taylor, 2019; Lewis, 2012). According to Levitt and Collins (2021), two contemporary and dominant forms of femme are based on (1) communicating relational preference for non-cisgender masculinities and (2) centralizing and affirming femininity within queer communities (p. 127). Since its first utterances, femme has shifted, expanded, and transformed amid much debate in queer communities and media around who can lay claim to this identity (e.g., Whittall, 2021). For some, femme is inherently a lesbian identity and to claim otherwise erases an important history (Levitt and Collins, 2021). In other cases, femme has been presented as inherently trans and, more specifically, the domain of Black trans women (Schwartz, 2020). To attend to the nuances of femme identity across queer cultures, I work with the capacious definition of femme as a queer and critical engagement with femininity that manifests in one’s style and values. In the context of the debates noted above, I argue that while Legally Blonde may not be a film about queer people, it can still be read as a femme media text.

Hitting the silver screen in the era of limited and problematic “gaystreaming” but before the “Golden Age” of queer representation in television (Parsemain, 2019: 28–31), Legally Blonde’s engagement with queerness is cursory, limited to brief and stereotypical portrayals of effeminate and sassy gay men at the hair salon and in the courtroom. In 2021—20 years after the film’s release—a rumor circulated online that the movie’s original ending left main character Elle Woods and her foil, Vivian Kensington, sharing margaritas on a beach, suggestive of a budding lesbian romance as the film’s resolution (Dawson, 2021). However exciting to queer audiences, the rumor was quickly squashed by Legally Blonde writers on Twitter, rendering fanciful any literal queer readings of the movie (Dawson, 2021). In contrast, Legally Blonde’s engagement with femininity is overt and central to the film.

In Legally Blonde, femininity is ultimately presented as a source of power. President of her sorority and a loyal sister, Elle is a fashion merchandising major who challenges “dumb blonde” stereotypes throughout the film despite her commitment to her appearance; she masterfully wields her fashion and beauty knowledge to avoid retail scams, win legal battles, and deflate her many opponents. But Elle’s femininity is also presented as a major site of conflict. Her hyperfeminine appearance means she is presumed to be unintelligent by virtually everyone she encounters, and she is subjected to discrimination and harassment by her Harvard Law School peers and professors alike.

The discrimination Elle endures is at least partially motivated by sexism and misogyny, but it also specifically targets her feminine gender presentation. ¹ For example, one fellow law student appropriates a so-called Valley-girl accent to mock and degrade Elle’s cheerful demeanor and friendliness, and other colleagues later suggest she would rather spend time at the spa (“isn’t that, like, your Mothership”) than working on the murder case at the center of the film. In this sense, though Elle may be disqualified from femme identification as a cis, heterosexual woman, these experiences illustrate Hoskin’s (2019b) argument that femmephobia, or a complex matrix of anti-feminine sentiments, attitudes, and behaviors, is not only experienced by queer femmes, but is rather a regulatory force applied to maintain the sex/gender binary. In short, Elle may not be a femme, but she does experience femmephobia.

Further, I will argue that the film’s narrative is demonstrative of how femme theory is produced and of a femme politic that includes the reclamation of femininity. Thus, my argument is not about the representation of queer femmes in mainstream media, but about the formulation of femme theory through a low-cultural form, the “chick flick.” The femininity that is represented in Legally Blonde productively complicates femme theory, materializing the argument that femme goes beyond the aesthetic and representative to encompass ways of feeling and thinking, while also raising important questions about the integration of postfeminism and femme theory.

Femme-inine failures and feminine success: The entanglement of postfeminism and femme theory

Legally Blonde was part of a wave of media texts that ushered in the “return of pink,” Dole’s (2008) shorthand for a cultural trend among young women of reclaiming femininity. Such a reclamation was politicized by third-wave feminists, particularly the sect of “girlie” feminists or “girlies,” whose culture, according to Dole, “embraces both sexual pleasure and the childhood girl pleasures of knitting, nail polish, and of course the emblematic color pink—Elle’s ‘signature color’” (p. 60). Drawing from Baumgardner and Richard’s (2000) foundational third-wave feminist text, Dole (2008: 60) writes: “Unlike most veteran feminists, girlie feminists believe that ‘it is a feminist statement to proudly claim things that are feminine, and the alternative can mean to deny what we are.’” Evoking early-aughts relics like The Powerpuff Girls, the Charlie’s Angels remake, and Sex and the City, Dole (2008) notes that at the same time that girlie feminists articulated this politic, postfeminist sentiment shaped a slew of media which posited that girls and young women could be smart, successful, and strong without sacrificing their femininity—whether it manifests as a penchant for makeup or a desire for a (sometimes literal) prince.

There are many ways to interpret postfeminism; Gill and Scharff (2011) say it can be interpreted as (1) an analytical perspective and a maturing of academic feminism; (2) a historical shift often associated/conflated with third-wave feminism; or (3) a backlash against feminism. Most important to understanding Legally Blonde and attempting to parse out its femme versus postfeminist dimensions is McRobbie’s (2009) notion of “double entanglement.” McRobbie (2009) argues that postfeminism is more insidious and complex than simply antifeminist backlash; she argues that elements of feminism have been taken into account, but that they are converted into an individualistic discourse and deployed as feminism’s substitute, and disseminated aggressively to ensure the women’s liberation movement does not re-emerge. McRobbie (2009) argues that concerns around structural power have given way to celebratory discourses of individual women and girls surrounding autonomy, pleasure, and femininity made available by consumer culture, which leaves no reason to challenge capitalism or its principles (p. 3). McRobbie’s notion of “double entanglement” refers to the simultaneous liberalization and neoliberalization of sexuality occurring within postfeminism. As a result of this entanglement, it is very tricky to conceptualize agency, especially that around embodying femininity, in neoliberal, postfeminist times. As such, postfeminism, third-wave feminist politics, and femme politics can become somewhat difficult to discern; all converge, in some capacity, around the reclamation and redefinition of femininity.

To produce a cogent femme identity that is distinct from normative femininity, much of femme literature has villainized the femininity embodied by cis, heterosexual women, claiming femme’s difference lies in its ironic uptake of patriarchal trappings such as makeup, short skirts, and high heels (Duggan and McHugh, 1996; Hollibaugh, 2000) and its conscious engagement with gendered power differences in sexual or otherwise intimate relationships (Case 1988; Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1992). Indeed, where postfeminism, as a neoliberal output, would focus on feminine success (McRobbie, 2009; Gill & Schaff, 2011), femme theory has focused on femme failure—as in femme’s failure to adhere to normative femininity (e.g., Brushwood Rose and Camilleri, 2002; Hoskin and Taylor, 2019). In particular, working -class, queer, and disabled femmes of color have mobilized their “failures” to achieve normativity to articulate the particularities of femme gender (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997). But if normative femininity is always already white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, thin, and able-bodied (e.g., Bordo, 1993; Davis, 1981; Deliovsky, 2008), failing to meet this standard is exceptionally easy—and not just for queer femmes.

In her examination of postfeminist digital cultures, Kanai (2019) argues that affective ties were made among young women on Tumblr as they blogged (and re-blogged) about their various feminine failures—as long as such failures were expressed through self-deprecating humor and were ultimately managed well enough to carry on along neoliberal trajectories of productivity and success. When femininity is such an impossible ideal, failure alone does not mark one as femme. As such, postfeminist analysis can productively complicate femme theory; that both queer and heterosexual women fail to master femininity suggests a need for a more nuanced theorization of femme and that a more fruitful theory of femininity can be fashioned by the alliances forged through excessive femininity, whether embodied by heterosexual women or queer femmes.

Critical engagements within femme theory offer a further incentive for eschewing a framework of failure. The (over)emphasis on irony and subversion that has been required to distance femmes from heterosexual, feminine women in femme theorizing has been critiqued for inadvertently reifying middle-class American masculinity (Galewski, 2005), privileging youth (Walker, 2012), and otherwise creating impossibly high standards and hierarchies of (high) femme-ininity (Martin, 1996; VanNewkirk, 2006). Outside of the North American academic context, femme theorists Ulrika Dahl (2017) and McCann (2018) have instead emphasized the relational and affective dimensions of femme. McCann (2018) makes a specific case for femme theory that focuses not on femme representation or politics, but on femme capacity. In my examination of Legally Blonde’s femme theory, I focus on what femininity can do, what alliances it can foster, and what knowledges it can produce—what we otherwise might understand as feminine “successes.”

“What, like it’s hard?”: Low theory and stupidity as femme praxis

Legally Blonde is the story of an American West Coast sorority girl whose unlikely journey through Harvard Law School challenges the established modes of achieving success. Though her application was initially motivated by a romantic ruse, Elle Woods’ admittance to Harvard and her subsequent successes as a law student are at least partially due to her mobilization of low theory, or the use of popular knowledge to hack the hierarchies of hegemonic knowledge and elitist structures of knowledge production. Halberstam (2011) developed the notion of low theory to explicate the concept of queer failure. He uses low theory and popular knowledge to “explore alternatives and to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations” (Halberstam, 2011: 2). He writes, “here we can think about low theory as a mode of accessibility, but we might also think about it as a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to confirm the hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory” (Halberstam, 2011: 16). Specifically, he draws from popular and “stupid” texts like SpongeBob SquarePants to destabilize the binary concepts of success and failure. For Halberstam, “stupidity” is shorthand for the naïve and nonsensical, which “may in fact lead to a different set of knowledge practices” (2011: 12).

Legally Blonde can be understood along these lines. Indeed, the film’s inciting incident—Elle’s decision to apply to law school—certainly privileges the “nonsensible or nonconceptual over sense-making structures that are often embedded in a common notion of ethics” (Halberstam, 2011: 12). But, in Legally Blonde, Elle Woods is frequently treated as “stupid” in another sense, as unintelligent—indeed, as a “dumb blonde.” The first sense is consistent with queer, camp cultures’ usage of “stupid,” evidenced by the popular cultural example of Rupaul’s Drag Race (2009–present) contestants and judges delighting in “stupid” performances of drag and gender. The second sense, however, is understood as an ableist slur, targeting individuals with cognitive impairments or who are otherwise neurodiverse. It is important to note that while Elle is seen as “stupid” by the other characters she encounters in the film, she is not presented as such; the audience is skillfully kept on her side as the film’s narrative unfolds. Though Elle is not presented as a disabled character, the audience’s curated affinity for her lack of conventional intelligence may also lend itself to a celebration of neurodiverse and disabled, in addition to queer and femme, modalities. ²

Elle’s gambit may begin “stupidly” or queerly—indeed, in the fashion of high femme camp antics (Davis, 2020)—but it does ultimately result in the achievement of normative standards of success: graduation from a prestigious law school and a heterosexual engagement. Along the way, however, her efforts are shored up by knowledge that has been gleaned from a multitude of popular cultural texts and what can be understood as popular knowledge; throughout the film, the use of such texts and knowledges signifies Elle’s “stupidity” and unbelonging in the elite academic space of Harvard Law. At the outset, Elle eschews the usual structure of an admissions essay and instead opts to produce an admissions video essay. In one scene in this film-within-a-film, to make her case that she would make an “amazing lawyer,” a bikini-clad Elle appears floating atop a pool buoyed by an inflatable tube. She tells the camera, “I’m able to recall hundreds of important details at the drop of the hat,” which cues her friend Margot to float through the shot to ask, “Elle, do you remember what happened on Days of Our Lives yesterday?” Elle succinctly recaps the previous day’s episode of the soap opera proudly, seemingly confident that she has demonstrated an invaluable skill and her capacity to excel at Harvard Law. In another scene in Elle’s video essay, she argues that she is an ideal law student because she is comfortable using legal jargon in everyday settings. She makes this statement as she strolls along a California street in a bright pink get-up, shouting “I object!” after a man grabs and whistles at her. In the video essay, Elle showcases her skills gained from watching soap operas—feminized and “low status texts” (Baym, 2000: 4)—as well as the everyday, lived experiences common among women and other feminized people: navigating sexist street harassment. The unusual video essay renders the admissions committee at Harvard mystified, though they ultimately accept her as a new student. However, the skills and knowledge Elle prizes may do more to gain attention than admission to Harvard Law; as Dole (2008) points out, Elle’s 4.0 GPA and 179 LSAT score are the most crucial conditions of her admittance. Even after her acceptance, Elle continues to “play dumb,” or what has been, ironically, intellectualized as employing the “Amelia Bedelia ditz trick” (Davis, 2020) or “critical flippancy” (Pérez, 2012): when Warner asks, bewildered, “you got into Harvard Law?” Elle responds, “what, like it’s hard?”

Beyond the admissions committee, the dissonance of Elle’s value system continues to be made apparent as she begins the semester at Harvard. During a round of obligatory introductions at orientation, Elle’s high-achieving peers list their extensive qualifications, including: a Master’s in Russian literature, PhDs in biochemistry and women’s studies, an IQ of 187, humanitarian work abroad, and community organizing work stateside. When it is Elle’s turn to introduce herself, aside from her Bachelor’s in Fashion Merchandising, she counts among her most notable accolades: being a Gemini, vegetarian, president of her sorority, homecoming queen, and a Zeta Lambda Nu Sweetheart. Similarly, earlier in the movie, when Elle’s academic advisor warns her that getting into Harvard would be a challenge, Elle tells her: “I once had to judge a tighty-whitey contest for Lambda Kappa Pi. Trust me, I can handle anything.” Elle’s unconventional resume of feats is suggestive of a set of values that prioritizes strong community relationships and the skills developed within them rather than impressive, institutionally sanctioned, individual feats—an alien set of values within the East Coast Ivy League’s cultural context. Elle is routinely mocked by her peers for expressing such values: when she asks the senior student organizing orientation for a social events calendar, he suggests that she would better belong on a cruise ship than to the incoming class at a prestigious university. Later, one of her PhD-holding peers, Enid Wexler, affects a Valley-Girl accent to reject Elle from her study group: “Maybe there’s, like, a sorority you could, like, join instead, like?” The attitude of Elle’s peers points to a broader view of femininity as frivolous, incongruous with studiousness and intelligence.

While Elle’s femininity has been thoroughly examined through an aesthetic lens—specifically, through the shades of blonde and pink (Dole, 2008)—the mocking exchanges about her social inclinations work to emphasize that femininity extends beyond the body and includes values, behaviors, and affects. Feminist critiques of femininity as an oppressive patriarchal construction have frequently focused on femininity as a bodily or aesthetic practice (Bordo, 1993; Brownmiller, 1984; De Beauvoir, 1989). Some have argued this has left little room for the exploration of the potential—subversive, political, and otherwise—of femininity (Dahl, 2012), or meaningful engagement with femininity as an intersection of oppression (Hoskin, 2017). Additionally, overlooking the material impact of femmephobia risks eliding analysis of femininity as a site of resistance, especially as it intersects with pressing feminist concerns like rape culture, sex work, and transfemininity (Grant, 2014; Payne, 2022; Serano, 2007). As noted earlier, even as femme literature has importantly responded to this framing of femininity, arguments regarding the subversive potential of adornment have been well-worn. If, as McCann (2018) says is necessary, femme theory is to move beyond aesthetics, representation, and politics, then considering femininity beyond the body is crucial.

Further, the stark dissonance embedded in the mocking exchanges described above underscores the (past?) necessity of marginalized groups’ reliance on low theoretical perspectives and sources. Elle’s peers reenact the literal exclusion of women and the ideological exclusion of the feminine from institutional knowledge production that has been elucidated by feminists since the 1970s (e.g., Cixous, 1975; Dalmiya and Alcoff, 1993; Irigaray, 1985), an exclusion that persists within queer studies, as noted by femme scholars (e.g., Dahl, 2012; Harris and Crocker, 1997). Barred from formal spaces of knowledge production, femme theory has instead been generated through non-academic and low-cultural texts (Schwartz, 2018; Brightwell and Taylor, 2021), a practice that is portrayed and accredited throughout the narrative of Legally Blonde.

Legally Blonde’s climax in the courtroom is also the peak of its engagement with low theory. As the newly minted head of the legal team, Elle is tasked with defending her sorority sister against murder charges. She flounders her way through the cross-examination until the witness, Chutney Windham, describes a suspicious sequence of events: she claims to have gotten a perm and then proceeded to take a shower. Well-versed in the “simple and finite” rules of haircare, Elle immediately knows that a perm would have been ruined by water, and yet Chutney’s curls remain intact. She pieces together these details, recounts a titillating tale about a wet T-shirt contest and a ruined perm for the court, and reveals Chutney’s alibi to be unequivocally false and, thus, Chutney to be the true murderer. Though the specifics of perm maintenance are highly scientific—involving the chemical compound ammonium thioglycolate—Elle’s route to this resolution can be traced not through her recent efforts to prove her worth through normative terms of intelligence, but, significantly, through her background as a well-socialized sorority girl: through participating in wet T-shirt contests, reading stacks of Cosmopolitan magazine, and talking through hairstyles with her peers. In other words, Elle’s annihilating knowledge is generated through engaging in frivolous, trivial, and vapid activities with other young women that are dismissed and demeaned by a masculinist, patriarchal culture. Rather than bask in the glory of her massive achievement, Elle dismisses this knowledge as ordinary rather than exceptional: “any Cosmo girl would’ve known,” she tells the reporters crowded outside the courtroom.

The roots of Elle’s successful day in court are significant to the film’s femme narrative. As I have noted, Elle’s story begins “stupidly” or queerly, but as she encounters backlash against her staunch femininity, she tries to re-route along a more normative course. Dole (2008) notes that it is only after she trades in her pink feather pen for a laptop that Elle begins succeeding in class and that, as she continues to succeed, she begins to dress the part, trading in her hot pink wardrobe for an array of East Coast neutrals. Indeed, is there any heavier signifier of a bimbo reformed than Elle’s declaration that being selected for the competitive internship was “so much better” than the “four amazing hours” she and Warner had previously spent together in a post-Winter Formal hot tub? Dole (2008) argues that Legally Blonde and its postfeminist contemporaries carry a warning about the limits and pitfalls of excessive femininity, which includes such extremes as sexual harassment. But Elle’s triumphant return to the courtroom, resplendent once more in hot pink and espousing the wisdom of wet T-shirt contests, seems to, rather, impress upon audiences that there is no pay-off for conforming, however briefly and badly, to normative expectations of dress and decorum; instead, such endeavors seem to result in “grim scenarios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again’” (Halberstam, 2011: 3). Of course, the possibility of a jubilantly nihilistic queer narrative is undermined by the tacked-on ending, which locates Elle at the valedictorian podium with a job offer in hand and a heterosexual marriage proposal looming.

The route to success may be queered, or more so femme’d, but the markers of success remain unchanged. Such a resolution is well explained by Dole (2008) and the framework of postfeminism, which perpetuates the notion that women can “have it all.” According to journalist Britt Dawson (2021), the original ending of Legally Blonde resolved the romance between Elle and Emmett with a kiss, not a marriage proposal, and saw the erection of Harvard’s Blonde Legal Defense Club at the hands of blonde besties, Elle and Vivian. This much campier ending did not resonate with test audiences, according to Dole (2008), who wanted a more “‘credibly successful’ ending for Elle” (p. 73). As such, the film’s full queer, femme potential was sacrificed to postfeminist whims; excessive femininity becomes not a way out nor a way toward alternative measures of success, but rather becomes subdued and folded into normative notions of success.

“Just because I’m not a vanderbilt, suddenly I’m white trash? I grew up in bel-air!”: Place, class, and femmeships in Legally Blonde

“Rather, fem(me) science recognizes the imperative to win, and rather like a delicately gloved hand that is capable of stinging slaps should the need arise, the fem(me) scientist solicits loving, grateful collaboration.” —Duggan and McHugh, 1996: 158

Elle may win the day in Legally Blonde, but she refuses to take sole credit for her courtroom success: “any Cosmo girl would’ve known!”, she claims. Such refusal is a signifier of femme’s mobilization of low theory (hair care rules delivered via Elle’s “Bible,” Cosmopolitan magazine) but also functions as a form of citational practice that signifies femme theory’s emphasis on collaboration (Dahl, 2011; Duggan and McHugh, 1996). As the above quote indicates, from its earliest figuration, collaboration has been a crucial element of femme theory, or, to use Duggan and McHugh’s phraseology, “fem(me) science” (1996: 158), but such collaborations are often rife with conflict and littered with political hurdles. For one, Dahl (2017) argues that the desire to be(long) with other femmes renders the femme vulnerable. For another, forming friendships and alliances with other femmes means navigating significant differences in power and privilege granted along lines of race, sex/gender, class, ability, and sexuality (Schwartz, 2020). But femmes frequently traverse this tricky terrain, forming bonds that transcend simple definitions of friendship. Instead, “femmeships” have been understood as political alliances and networks of care (Schwartz, 2020: 126). Such complex bonds unfold on the screen in Legally Blonde.

We first encounter Elle at home in her sorority, where the friendships seem easy and natural. Dole (2008) argues that “sisterhood” is a value that Elle attempts to transplant from her West Coast sorority to the East Coast, but finds a more receptive crowd in the nail salon than among the academic elite. Elle makes a fast friend in her nail technician Paulette, with whom she shares aesthetic sensibilities and an affinity for canine companions. The nail salon is often a working-class coded and racialized space. That Elle’s excessive femininity goes unquestioned here as well as in the wealthy suburbs of California suggests that specific feminine cultures are place- and class-based. Further, her acceptance in both working class and wealthy cultures of femininity suggest the potential for cross-class alliances. Theories of femme as both a performative gender (e.g., Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Case, 1988; Duggan and McHugh, 1996; Hollibaugh, 2000) and as an affective relation (Dahl, 2017; McCann, 2018) cement Butler’s (2004) argument that gender is “collectively-produced” (p. 1). Whether subversively performed for an audience or earnestly embodied as a catalyst for connection and belonging, femininity is ultimately about community, and can work to define feminine (sub)cultures or communities. Feminine aesthetic sensibilities—as well as their transgressive potential—can be regional, and nonconformity to such codes can result in rejection (Keenan, 2008). In this sense, the East Coast elite’s rejection of Elle and her Californian femininity is a regulatory maneuver—a form of regional gender policing.

Though not much is made of it made it in the film, experiencing rejection for, presumably, the first time, Elle is motivated to find alliances in unexpected places. To do so, she must reconsider her relationship to the working-class whiteness from which she had previously distanced herself: when Warner first ends his relationship with Elle in the film’s opening scenes, citing his need for a “Jackie” not a “Marilyn,” one of Elle’s responses was, “Because I’m not a Vanderbilt, suddenly I’m white trash? I grew up in Bel-Air, Warner!” But on the East Coast, the distance Elle insisted on is drastically reduced; here, Elle suddenly has more in common with the white working class, like Paulette, than the elite with whom Elle had previously claimed belonging. Paulette and Elle’s relationship is comprised of both acts of care in the form of manicures, dating advice, and other emotional support, as well as political solidarity. For example, in an act of cross-class allyship, Elle travels with Paulette to the trailer park where she utilizes her burgeoning legalese and an authoritative air bestowed by her race and class privileges to convince Paulette’s ex-boyfriend that Paulette is their dog’s rightful custodian. For Paulette and Elle, feminine presentation is not intentionally subversive in the ways that much of femme literature insists, but it does enable recognition, affection, and community (Butler, 2004; Dahl, 2017; McCann, 2018) that become the grounds for acts of allyship.

Though I argue that Elle must reevaluate her own racialized class bias to befriend Paulette, theirs is figured as an easy friendship in the film, forged through their shared, excessive femininity. Elle is placed in more blatant opposition to Vivian Kensington, the woman for whom Warner left Elle. Termed “femme competition” in queer culture (Schwartz, 2020: 139), Elle and Vivian’s rivalry is only made legible by the patriarchal scarcity model in which men are heralded as resources for which women must fiercely compete. And indeed, their competition is fierce: Vivian tricks Elle into showing up to a party in a skimpy bunny costume, Elle volleys back the insulting words “frigid bitch” and “constipated,” and they each flex their sizable intellect in various showdowns in the classroom. However, an alliance between the two women begins to take shape during their stint as legal interns as they bond over the sexist attitudes of their professor as well as Warner’s callous and incompetent masculinity (e.g., his inability to do his laundry or get into law school on his own; his advice: “Who cares about Brooke? Think about yourself”). Both Warner and the professor are figures representing the grander patriarchal scheme that defines Elle and Vivian as enemies. That Warner finds himself single at the end of the movie while his two ex-girlfriends have become best friends is a metaphor for Elle and Vivian’s divestment from patriarchal ideology and reinvestment in the bonds of sisterhood.

In the fictitious landscape of Legally Blonde, the triumphs of femmeship are rendered in both material and ideological terms, encompassing acts of care including emotional support, material gains brought about by acts of cross-class allyship, and the symbolic victory of choosing each other over men. In the case of Elle and Vivian, feminine embodiment is not the site of bonding that it is for Elle and Paulette, but rather it is Elle’s commitment to femininity which extends beyond the body to include feminized social values, like friendliness, sharing, and secret-keeping—which become politicized as collaboration, citational practice, and sisterhood—that cements their alliance.

Conclusion

Though Legally Blonde is the story of a heterosexual, cisgender young woman, its interpretation as a femme media is enabled by an examination of its (1) overt reclamation of femininity; (2) use of low theory or “stupidity,” and; (3) emphasis on collaboration and citational practice, or “femmeship.” In fact, Legally Blonde so clearly communicates some of the key concepts and methods of femme theory that it lends further credence to Parsemain’s (2019) argument that television—or in this case, cinema—has its own pedagogy; it entertains to educate. Beyond representing femme theory, Legally Blonde also complicates femme theory by suggesting that femininity’s successes as well as femme failures can produce critical and nuanced conceptualizations of femininity. In Legally Blonde, femininity’s achievements are many, but for the purposes of practicing femme theory, the most notable successes encompass the formation and nurturance of femmeships, including cross-class alliances, and the valorization of “low” and feminized knowledges.

The engagement with the notion of success can foster new alliances for femme theory itself. It is precisely Legally Blonde’s tango with success that urges an expansion of femme theory. I have argued that it is Elle’s ultimate normative success that undermines the film’s queer potential, but it is also what points to the necessity of bringing the pressures of postfeminism, or femininity under neoliberalism, to bear on theories of femme-ininity as subversive and resistant.

Legally Blonde remains postfeminist, but not post-femme; more than 20 years after its release, it remains relevant at a critical moment in the development of femme theory, well-positioned to prompt the expansion of femme theory through an engagement with postfeminism and heterosexual embodiments of femininity, rather than their disavowal. As femme grows more and more mainstream (Whittall, 2021), attending to these points of both friction and connection—indeed, cultivating femmeship between theories—also grows more and more urgent.