Emphasized and Non-Emphasized Femininities: A Structured Action Perspective

Raewyn Connell’s concept of “emphasized femininity” remains foundational to gender scholarship, yet it is often treated as a static or singular formation. In this article, we revisit and extend the concept using structured action theory, highlighting the contextual, reflexive, and routinized nature of gendered structured action. We reanalyze a collection of published qualitative studies to illustrate how femininities—emphasized and non-emphasized—are variably constructed through accountability, femmephobia, and the relational and discursive structures that shape gendered practice. Through this reanalysis, we demonstrate how emphasized femininities are contextually fluid configurations that are essential to the legitimation of hegemonic masculinities and reinforce gender inequality. By contrast, non-emphasized femininities are defined primarily through the construction of intragender hierarchies among femininities. This highlights the analytic value of structured action theory for theorizing femininities as diverse, relational, and embedded within systems of power.