Do you want to be a normal girl? Do you yearn to perform femininity, even in your own home, so you might feel good about appearing as a “normal woman”? Instead of feeling like an alien who cannot fully grasp the conventions of human etiquette? Look no further! Here are 4 easy steps to reshaping your hideous abnormalities into a normal female face – presented with absolutely no hidden agenda!

 

Step 1: Acne Cream 

Before you put anything on your face, you must first acknowledge your deformities. Only then can you cover them properly. As a human female, your face must be clear and smooth and pale, just as your behaviour should be delicate and gentle, never too rough, never too emotional. There is always something wrong with your body, so start going to the doctor when your puberty hits so they can fix everything about you. 

Is your menstruation irregular at age 14? Take the Pill! Do you have glowing red pimples on your face? Try Roaccutane! (Remember not to donate blood or to get pregnant, though.) Do you get autistic meltdowns because the noises are too loud on the street? Here’s a 12-pack of Xanax tablets! Our bodies do not belong to us. We swallow pills to assume an ideal and we are told that our natural selves are deviant. We are told to shave and sand ourselves down till we’re perfect little wooden models sitting on an artist’s desk (Shapiro 2015, 185). As technology advances, newer forms of medicalisation emerge to cure us and restore normalcy. New problems concerning the female body arise, and instead of addressing these problems, our flesh is molded and manipulated to fit into the trendiest ideals. We are not in control, because doctors know best, and when they give you a potion or a little tube of magic, we are expected and coerced into embracing these tools that promise to make us perfect. A little metaphorical acne cream fixes everything: targeted spot treatment makes the blemishes go away, without acknowledging the deep-rooted systemic problems that herald the image of pale, glass skin as the universal ideal. Similarly, autistic minds are medically categorised as deviant and divergent from the typical, and when our needs are not met with respect but with a ruler to beat us into obedience, the child learns to conceal, to use blemish control to target their “problem areas” (Carrier 1983, 964). Growing up as a well-behaved, academically successful, and seemingly neurotypical girl, the cracks in my fragile mask were branded as moral failures: laziness, forgetfulness and ignorance, traits considered inherent in my male cousins. The more energy I spent on masking, the more I fell behind academically. Everyone I knew in my girls’ school medicated to cope with our broken education system (Ryan 2015, 31), neurodivergent or not; most take pills to live, some take them to die, I took them to seem human. I was never diagnosed with anything but was told I had to keep up with my peers. My mother took me off pills the moment my public exams ended. Roaccutane, Luvox, Ponstel, Xanax, Silenor, Panadol, etc. The problem was gone (What systemic problem? It’s all in your head, darling), my face was clear, and I was perfect again. All you need is a little acne treatment–cover your entire face with it if you need to–and you’ll be a normal girl in no time!

Step 2: Serum

What is serum? It is the mystical elixir that brightens your skin from the inside. If you don’t put on serum, your skin won’t be properly hydrated, and you won’t be able to achieve the glass skin of Korean pop stars! See, it’s all about internal work – to look perfect you have to start from within. Women are ugly creatures. If your natural face is unattractive, you are not respectable. But putting on makeup means you are superficial and a liar. To be a minority is to always be caught in the crossfire of proving your identity without inhabiting a stereotype. It is a lose-lose situation under the white-as-universal, phallocentric global hegemony that pitches minorities against each other and arbitrarily prescribes deviance to maintain a social order. Historically, this can be seen in case studies like the nationality of mixed-race children in French and Dutch colonies in Asia. As summarised concisely by Stoler, “The assault [on the identity of the métissage population] was double-edged. It blamed those impoverished for their condition but also suggested more subtly that if they were really Dutch in spirit and drive, such problems of pauperism would not have arisen” (1992, 533). In the same vein of logic, autistic people who have learnt to mask since they were children also have their disabled identities invalidated when their access needs are denied or questioned because they don’t “seem autistic”. At a young age, arbitrary values were implicitly assigned to different autistic traits I had. Fathers yell at their autistic toddlers for having a sensory meltdown; mothers sigh when their little girls can’t sit still; relatives compliment your parents for having a well-behaved child when you don’t speak much; parents of other children applaud when you know what the capital of Finland is at age 4. Eventually, the child internalises these responses to please adults. No more crying and throwing tantrums, because if she hits another child in a playfight she will get three times the punishment that her brother gets. She will stomach the angry glares of adults while she swallows food uncomfortably, with staring, dry eyes. What I thought would grant me acceptance became internalised misogyny, racism, ableism, and classism, as with masking came social mobility and a sense of superiority because you are the perfect, obedient child (Carrier 1983, 965). The autistic feminine body is a site of heavy surveillance, synoptic in creating stigma against what is deemed disruptive and ugly, and panoptic in creating a need to conform (Couch et al. 2015, 133). Yet, when you try to rip the decade-long mask off your face, if your deviance isn’t defiant enough, your identity is also questioned. Society does not want to bear witness to the fractured remnants of perfection decorating the scarred and shrivelled-up flesh underneath. But, of course, a little TLC is all you need (the normal girl was always inside of her!); a drop of serum will make your skin glow, and, soon enough, no one will care if you’re a bit weird – as long as you’re pretty enough!

Step 3: Moisturiser

When I was seeking treatment for my acne-ridden skin, my dermatologist explained to me the difference between serum and moisturiser: applying serum to skin is like pouring water into a cup, whereas moisturiser is the lid that keeps the water from evaporating. Extending the metaphor then, serum represents the internal work that we do to appear normal, while moisturiser can be likened to the rules, laws, and policies that keep us in our places. Our bodies are constricted by the corsets of convention and our ability to breathe is stifled by the state, that is heavily informed by Western ideals and Christianity. Its government on how “sexually deviant” units should interact with society creates a tolerance for certain queer people through homonormativity (Winter 2018, 123) and makes heathens using secular laws (122). Not only does state control draw a marked boundary between what is considered acceptable and inacceptable, it also erects a hierarchy of normality that overlooks intersectionality and expects individuals from minority groups to behave according to its ideals despite their marginalisation. While not officially a state entity, the Catholic school I attended back in Hong Kong was an extension of Western government, by serving as an active instrument of British imperialism and colonialism. The main language of instruction was English, relegating Chinese writing and spoken dialects to the confines of Chinese classes. We had English ambassadors who would monitor our language use during breaks, and if someone was caught talking in Cantonese their names would be marked down. At the time, my special interests were rooted in Anglophone media, so I was fairly proficient in English for my age, compared to my Chinese which was below average. While I had imbalanced grades, because of the academic and moral value that was placed on a student’s proficiency in English, both by our colonial academic institutions and the broader society and state, I was still arbitrarily perceived to be a high-achieving student, and my inability to memorise Chinese poetry was framed as a personal failure instead of a learning disability. On all fronts, I seemed like the perfectly normal girl: on track, destined for an elite university, someone whose potential was greater than her flaws, someone whose flaws could be overcome with enough determination, and I had to keep up with that appearance to be accepted. At 17 years old, I chopped my waist-length hair into a pixie-cut, and those walls of expectations crumbled to the ground. I was instantly legible as a butch lesbian (I wasn’t one), and was seen as more rebellious (I was a rule-follower). When I eventually grew my hair back out, the short hair was dismissed as a mere phase, and the autistic mask came up again, just as moisturiser locked in the serum of internal work that had been fed into my skin.

Step 4: Sunscreen 

My presentation over the years was a reaction to the sun rays that leave my skin painfully blistered. I’ve tried following skin care guides and handbooks to appear normal, but the weight of seeming human is too enormous to bear. It is impossible to be a normal girl when normality and gender are simply hierarchical concepts that discount elements like race, class, and disability. Rather than following yet another skin care guide, maybe we should question the capitalist gendered existence of skin care instead.

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