When my friend Megan and I, sitting on the lawn in front of Olin, smoking our post-lunch cigarettes, were approached by Jessie Schiewe and asked to be interviewed for an Argus article about women smokers, we eagerly agreed. The reasons women choose to smoke, the scientific community’s “objective,” and therefore legitimate discourse around the hazards related to smoking, the relegation of smoking to different physical spaces, and the ways different women smokers are “read” based on race, class, age, and gender performance are all ideas we’ve discussed. In thinking about the role smoking plays in my own identity formation, I’ve considered interviewing other woman smokers, and doing a project on smoking as an aspect of self-definition, as well as a visual performance that is interpreted differently dependant on a woman’s race, class, age, and gender expression. The prospect of contributing to an Argus article about women smokers interested me as an opportunity to articulate my thoughts about my identity as a smoker, and spark conversation about the many meanings the label of “smoker” brings when attached to different people.
Schiewe framed her questions very personally and anecdotally – why we started smoking and continue to do so, whether and when we might quit. I talked about my starting to smoke as part of my rejection of the innocent, good, studious girl identity I felt imposed on me in high school. Schiewe’s quotation of me saying, “I think that a lot of women smoke because smoking for women is about rejecting what it means to be feminine. Femininity is associated with purity, cleanliness, and lack of toxins, and a woman who smokes is the exact opposite” was taken from that conversation. Out of context, that quote erases the existence of women of color who are not constructed as pure, clean, and free of toxicity. It positions white, middle and upper class womanhood as the entirety of femininity, a frequent mechanism of exclusion used by white women to advance their own brand of feminism. My comments were embedded within a discussion of smoking as a means of combating my own female subjectivity, and I’ve often thought about the ways my smoking interacts with my visual performance of skinny, long blond haired, blue eyed, polite white womanhood. Knowing that Schiewe could observe those physical markers prevented me from making their impact explicit in my explanation of my identity as a smoker. I write now to clarify my comment, and to apologize for its denial of the experience of women of other identities.
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