There is a tendency, in both popular and academic discourse, to flatten the relationship between feminism and chivalry into something oppositional.
What gets lost in that flattening is the question of practice.
Feminism, as articulated across traditions, from bell hooks’ insistence on love as an ethic of care, to Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of orientation, has never been concerned with the elimination of care. Rather, it is preoccupied with the conditions under which care is offered, received, and made meaningful.
Care, in this sense, is structured by power.
To offer care without attending to power is to risk reproducing the very hierarchies feminism seeks to unsettle. This is where much of the unease around chivalry sits, not in the act itself, but in its historical encoding as a gendered script that positioned women as passive recipients and men as moral actors.
Yet, as Judith Butler reminds us, social scripts are not fixed; they are performed, reiterated, and therefore open to reconfiguration. The question is not whether chivalry exists, but how it is enacted.
There are forms of attentiveness that are free from hierarchy.
I am thinking of an encounter that, in retrospect, clarified this for me. It involved someone whose actions were neither announced nor stylised. There was no overt signalling of virtue, no attempt to locate himself within a recognisable script of “good manhood.” Instead, there was a consistent responsiveness to context.
Things were handled when they needed to be handled.
Space was made when it was required.
Nothing was leveraged for recognition.
What distinguished this mode of engagement was not its visibility, but its orientation. It was organised around the act of care itself. In Ahmed’s terms, it did not redirect attention back to the subject performing the gesture. It allowed the gesture to remain with the person it was intended for.
This is a useful distinction.
Because what is often defended as chivalry operates quite differently.
There is a mode of politeness that adheres closely to the outward markers of respectability while functioning as a mechanism of control. It is legible, socially sanctioned, and difficult to contest precisely because it leaves so little trace.
The message that sticks to formality of logistics, “let me know when you get home” without confirmation of the fact.
The door held open, no longer accompanied by the eye contact that once came with it.
The introduction that names your role, but not your presence.
Within feminist scholarship, this can be understood through what Joan Acker terms “gendered substructures”—the subtle, often invisible practices through which power is maintained within ostensibly neutral interactions. What appears as restraint can function as regulation. What appears as politeness can operate as lacking emotion.
There is a disciplining quality to this kind of interaction.
It withholds rather than confronts.
It signals rather than states.
It maintains the moral high ground while quietly reconfiguring the terms of engagement.
In interpersonal terms, it can feel like punishment without event. There is no rupture to point to, no explicit act to respond to. Only a shift in texture—an absence where presence once was, carefully managed so as not to disrupt the appearance of composure.
This is performance organised around perception.
Feminist critiques of such dynamics have long emphasised the importance of intention and effect. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s work on power and representation reminds us that actions cannot be disentangled from the structures they reproduce. To act “as if” one is being respectful, while enacting forms of control, is to rely on the recognisability of respectability rather than its substance.
bell hooks offers a more direct framing: love and care are defined not by intention alone, but by the presence of honesty, accountability, and sustained attention. Without these, gestures remain gestures; detached from the relational work that gives them meaning.
Understood in this way, feminism attends to chivalry as a practice, one that is continuously reshaped through attention, accountability, and relational awareness
It asks that attentiveness be decoupled from dominance.
That care be responsive rather than prescriptive.
That gestures emerge from an ethic of mutual recognition rather than a performance of gendered virtue.
What remains is something quieter, but more exacting.
A way of showing up that does not rely on being seen.
A way of engaging that does not require the other person to diminish themselves in order to receive it.
A way of holding space that is accountable to the person within it.
Chivalry lives in small, unremarkable moments that accumulate into a sense of ease. It is recognisable precisely because it does not need to announce itself.
Feminism, at its most generative, creates the conditions for this kind of practice to be named and sustained.
A rearticulation of care; one that holds both autonomy and attentiveness in view,
and remains accountable to both.
