The Problem with Quirky
On the reductive label applied to
female creativity.
By Madelin Newman
Illustrations by Ellen Porteus
When someone is painted with the quirky brush, it imbues their work with a set of preconceived notions — it is odd, zany, cutesy, weird, personal and light. It is not intellectual, meaningful or serious.
In her postmodern, epistolary novel, I Love Dick, Chris Kraus describes a character she created for an independent East Village play, saying “She became that word that people use to render difficult women weightless: Gabi Teschi was ‘quirky’”. Krauss has since elaborated that her motivation in writing the book was to try and “figure out why there was no position in the culture for female outsiders… Singular men are geniuses. Singular women are just ‘quirky’.” It is within this seemingly harmless term that patriarchal oppression can be keenly felt — the quirky label, it turns out, is subtly undermining our understanding of female creativity.
On the surface, quirky describes stylistic choices. It relates to modes of dress, mannerisms, speech patterns, hair styles, a penchant for hats, etc. But it has also come to describe the quality of work, the seriousness of intent and the value (or lack thereof) of creative output. When someone is painted with the quirky brush, it imbues their work with a set of preconceived notions — it’s, cutesy, weird, personal and light, not intellectual, meaningful or serious. It’s an inherently superficial term used to suggest superficiality, and it’s applied sweepingly describe a huge variety of women from Tavi Gevinson to Zooey Deschanel to Miranda July. These women aren’t merely quirky. They are ambitious, creative and original. They are interesting. But labelling them (and many other female creatives with a personality) under this blanket term strips them of their power and lessens the gravity of their work. Lena Dunham considered the female creative process in her book Not That Kind of Girl, writing “As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there is still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.” These limitations set on female self-expression are embodied by ‘quirkiness’ — a patronising way to categorise and disarm what might otherwise be called honest and thoughtful exploration into female (particularly young female) experience. It may be just a word can do, but the power of language in promoting patriarchy is well documented.
While not a term that is exclusively applied to women (see: Wes Anderson, Michael Cera), it does connote femininity, which is where double standards begin to manifest. When a man is, or creates work that is, eccentric or alternative, there is a seriousness afforded him that is not extended to women. It’s even present in the cult of celebrity personality. Ryan Gosling is a sensitive heart throb for taking ballet classes and James Franco’s idiosyncrasies make him an enigma (albeit an achingly pretentious one), yet Zooey Deschanel’s off-beat traits are at best dismissed as cute and quirky, and at worst labelled fake and repugnant (more on that later). Why are men’s character quirks more legitimate than women’s?
The reductiveness of the term is especially evident in its application to “quirky” writer/director/actress/artist Miranda July — this despite her work delving into themes of mortality, artistic struggle and human connection. But because she’s female, because she’s “quirky”, these themes are often overlooked in favour of discussions about her attention to stylistic details and her off-beat characters. A profile on July in the New York Times noted this, saying:
“Her work is highly personal, delving into the emotional, inner life — in other words, it’s girl stuff. Criticism of July often carries a whiff of sexism. “Precious,” “light,” and “twee” all describe conventionally feminine qualities, and all have been tossed July’s way as insults.”
Whereas it is refreshing when intimate, stylised work is created by a man (“isn’t he brave for getting in touch with his feminine side?”) (see: Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Noah Baumbach), July is harpooned for being a self-absorbed, art-house hipster, more style than substance.
How “quirky” shifted beyond simply meaning alternative or out-of –the-box is hard to pinpoint, although there’s an interesting interplay between art and artistry, and between characters and real people. It’s connotations of vapidity, whimsy and, often, worthlessness, has largely coincided with the proliferation of the “quirky” girl archetype, known in film and TV as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG), perhaps best embodied by characters portrayed by aforementioned quirky girl goddess: the wide eyed, cinched waist Zooey Deschanel.
Like July, Deschanel is a divisive figure — her ultra femme, off-beat characters in movies like (500) Days of Summer and Fox’s hit TV show New Girl have received plenty of criticism for being little more than male fantasies of girlish femininity. The latter is actually part of a show with a female creator and showrunner, although the former, along with other classic “quirky” characters (Natalie Portman in Garden State, Kate Hudson in Almost Famous) are the product of male creators. But Deschanel is an especially interesting case for the way the same accusations levelled against her characters have crossed over into her real life persona. While some of the classic MPDG girls do rightly draw criticisms of having no inner life, of existing only for male wish fulfilment, it becomes slightly ridiculous when she, Zooey Deschanel, the actress, is herself accused of being a MPDG. How can you accuse a real person of having no inner life?
Deschanel herself has been outspoken on the issue, adopting the third wave feminist position of ‘it’s my identity, I can do what I want to.’ She took up the issue in Glamour Magazine, saying “we can’t be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a fucking feminist and wear a fucking Peter Pan collar. So fucking what.”
There is something troubling about fetishizing girlishness. Infantilisation, even if it’s self-directed, inevitably suggests the need for the protection of men. As Gry Rustad wrote in her essay ‘Metamodernism, Quirky and Feminism’, “infantilization has long been argued by feminists to be a patriarchal strategy to de-power women’s subjectivity.” Which leads to the other problem with ‘quirky’ as it spills beyond the screen: pop culture does not exist in a vacuum. Deschanel and New Girl creator/showrunner Liz Merriweather should, ideally, be free to create characters or to themselves embody the signifiers of quirkiness, with all its girlishness, without worrying about its broader impact. But as it is, there are potential consequences to privileging this version of femininity by giving it a starring role in a network TV show. This archetype has become so corrupted thatcreative females are now either forced to explore other potentially less feminine archetypes and stories in order to gain artistic legitimacy or to constantly defend themselves against accusations of frivolity.
It’s complicated, but regardless of the issues surrounding Deschanel’s representation of femininity, the central problem of the myth of the quirky girl is that it creates a set of standards and characteristics that is uniformly applied to, as Krauss put it, “singular women”. In this way July, an art-house director, short story writer and artist, is constantly compared to Deschanel, a comedic actress despite their wildly different intentions (not to mention the variety of work by others such as Lena Dunham, Jenny Slate and Tavi Gevinson). Apparently there is only one acceptable off-beat female archetype, and any difference or variation in output is lost. No one word can meaningfully describe the scope of work to which quirky is applied. That it’s not only reductive but also borderline disrespectful makes it even more problematic.
Why is there not room for a variety of singular female voices? In order to change the way authentic expressions of female experience is thought of, we need a whole lot of new words — quirky just doesn’t cut it.
