[Martina]

Second page. Hope it's all there. Had to paste paragraphs separately ---

This is a woman, a femme, for whom invisibility is not a source of anxiety. She is a housewife and a writer. She passes and experiences her femininity as more and more natural, integral to herself, as she says. Sheiner makes the point that a lot of her changing understanding of herself as femme is a function of age, not just of her relationship and of heterosexual privilege. But she does benefit from that, and her experience points out that, like it our not, many of us do. What else do we gain from Sheiner’s experience and wisdom? We are reminded that a passing femme is still a femme, an invisible femme is still a femme, and that our connection to her, and hers to straight women, is useful and powerful -- in part because all of us spend some time passing, some time invisible. Including the experience of women like Steiner is not just inclusive; it is empowering. There are numbers of femmes whose sexual agency and power are not expressed or experienced by performing femininity in apparently transgressive ways. Moreover, femmes who experience their femininity as similar to their mothers and their straight women friends remind us of our connection to these women and the richness of their lives.

Katherine Payne is a femme who did not connect to other femmes until she read Joan Nestle's story of her straight mother. In her essay, “Whores and Bitches Who Sleep with Women,” Payne discusses the connection between sex workers and femmes. For her, the metaphor of femme as performative and transgressive resonates. Payne believes that there can be “no sound analysis of the cultural position of femme without a basis in an analysis of the cultural, legal, and economic position of prostitutes." She holds that “femininity and sexual agency equal potential social chaos and, therefore, those who combine these qualities must be stigmatized, criminalized, and maligned.” Speaking as a sex worker, Payne addresses femmes: “Betcha we shop in the same stores, wrestle the same demons, carry comparable fears through the world. Chances are we frequently get mistaken for each other.”

However, Payne didn’t connect strongly with her femme identity until she read Joan Nestle’s “My Mother Liked to Fuck.” In that amazing essay, Joan explains that her will to fight the sex wars arose from remembering her mother’s love of sex and unwillingness to let anyone make her ashamed of it. Payne says, “Nestle gave me a huge and priceless gift in her affiliation with and defense of her trampy working class mom. The woman Nestle described had unapologetic sexual agency, and was consequently marginalized, shamed, and economically at risk. This resonated for me. For the first time, I could imagine a place in the history of ‘lesbians’ where I might find allies and assert my priorities.” Payne’s understanding of femme is very close to the dominant metaphors of performance, parody, and excess. But what is interesting to me is that it is Nestle’s avowal of her connection to her straight mother’s complex life, Nestle's understanding of that history as available to empower her to fight for her right to fuck the way she liked, that reaches across time to Payne, who continues to make connections outside of the queer community to sex workers of all genders.

Avowing a connection to straight housewives, as Sheiner does, or straight women who risk themselves to create a place for their own sexual agency, as did Nestle and does Payne, entails a willingness to accept even the scary and heteronormative parts of our lives. It requires us to look at how sexism might operate in our own communities. It requires that we confront the potential for violence and abuse in our worlds. But it is also incredibly empowering and creative, and it acknowledges the lives of real femmes as they are actually lived.

Butler writes that “it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.” However, even when we do try to avoid the creation of prescriptive identities, some metaphors will gain more power in our culture than others – for very good reasons. They do resonate. They do address current issues and concerns. They are pushing forward the goals that the group shares. But we need to always take stock of what we are defining ourselves against and what pieces of ourselves we leave behind as we do.

Butler does not argue that we should change all disavowals into avowals, that we should assert only similarities and ignore differences. Most femmes are, in fact, not straight. There are differences between femmes and feminine lesbians. Her argument is simply to note the exclusions, to know what we are doing and to trace the connections.

My personal experience is a bit like Sheiner’s. As I get older, I relax into my femininity and feel more sure of it. It feels more natural. In the last year or so, I have lost a great deal of weight. And as my face changes, the person I see in the mirror is my mother. My mother was a working mom, a school teacher. She kept her hair short and used only three items of makeup. She had no doubt about her femininity and was not doubted in it. She was also comfortable in her body. As I see her in myself more and more, and as I age, my connection to my own femininity feels stronger, less like performance and more as something indistinguishable from who I am in all respects. My performance of femme is not excessive or transgressive. If you set me down in a baby shower, I would fit right in. And that would be fine. My fear is that some femmes who come to the identity now won’t find the thing that catches their attention, that makes them feel that they are part of the lineage, as Payne did when she read Nestle’s article, or that their road to it will inspire unnecessary self doubt.

Even Rebecca Ann Rugg, whose great line in "How Does She Look?" advocates our "running in loud mouth packs," agrees that foregrounding femme identity as transgressive has its drawbacks. She fears that it might end up excluding women who are older, “relegating these ladies to some older than hip shelf.” Melanie Murtry and Kristin Tucker, in an essay called "Femme Femininiites," also consider femme’s ironic performance of gender its core identifying feature. They argue that visibility and the power to transform femininity do come from extreme performance – body modifications, a pomo style etc. They also argue for loudness and excess, for us to celebrate the sexiness of women of size and femmes who strap it on. But they also – briefly -- mention that there are femmes for whom silence is powerful.

Distinguishing ourselves from straight women and from feminine lesbians by virtue of our extreme performance of gender, by our fight against invisibility, by the transgressive potential of our expression of gender politicizes femme in the same way that some lesbians politicized that identity in the seventies, a politicization that, as we all know, excluded femme. In making the opposite of the brazen femme the domain of oppressed straight women and sell-out dykes, we create no place for femmes of different styles and gender expressions to occupy.