[Martina]

The Lady Snow encouraged me to post part of the femme paper I referred to. I can't find the Bibliography. This was something I read aloud, so I didn't worry about formatting, spelling and so on. So this is the whole thing. To do excerpts, I'd have to think. And I am opposed to thinking on Friday evenings. I thought I excerpted parts on the old site, but a search did not bring up the post. Oh well.

OH, this is from 2006. The articles I cite are even older. Things have changed. Heart pointed out that one of the keynote speakers at a later femmecon made a lot of these points -- that we cannot define femme in opposition to other feminine people, that there are real dangers to doing that. So the arguments here are dated.

I am not being falsely modest when I say that I do not encourage anyone to slog through it. Personally, I'd rather be watching "Gangnam Style" on youtube. But here it is. I will probably have to post twice to get it all in.

Many people writing or creating art on the subject of femmes and femme identity are aware of the pitfalls of presenting femme as a cohesive collective identity. At the very least, they are conscious of the risks of exclusion. In their wonderful essay, “A Fem(me)inist Manifesto,” Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh write, “It diminishes a femme, all femmes, to talk about a femme identity in itself. How could that be? Femme is neither an ideal nor a category.” (p.165) There is an awareness that a collective identity that is normative, rather than descriptive, one that might be felt to have prescriptive force, does not serve us well. This awareness is fairly widespread, i think.

Creating numbers of identities within femme to accommodate our diversity is not effective either. Judith Butler claims this “only produces a greater factionalization, a proliferation of differences without any means of negotiating among them.” Clearly there is the risk of creating hierarchies and of establishing categories which compete. It’s also an additional opportunity to police others’ or one’s own identity. Many femmes i know refuse an identification more specific than "femme" out of fear of inadvertently excluding or creating such hierarchies. They may be high femme in practice, but not in name.

However, many seem to find constructing femme identity through disavowing identification with straight women and with feminine lesbians less problematic. In her essay “How Does She Look?” Rebecca Ann Rugg writes, “the problem for the femme dyke who is not assimilationist is not only distinguishing herself from straight women, but from those femmes who consider straight-acting a compliment.”

Judith Butler acknowledges that identities are created through a series of disavowals and repudiations. She explains that “certain disavowals are fundamentally enabling and that no subject can proceed, can act, without disavowing certain possibilities and avowing others.” (p. 116) Identities do not have to be cohesive, logical, or water-tight. They should not be. But they do have to mean something. Excluding possibilities creates meaning. Moreover, gender identity is not an optional project. We cannot become desiring subjects in the world without constructing gender identities for ourselves, even if multiple and fluid.

However, as some femme writers do it, distinguishing ourselves from straight women has meant more than asserting our existence. It has included the ongoing project of rehabilitating femininity from its association with powerlessness and loss. A great project, but as we have carried it out, one that has characterized straight women in terms of that powerlessness and loss. Distinguishing ourselves from feminine lesbians has provided femme writers the opportunity to protest femme invisibility and politicize our identity, also laudable projects, but, in characterizing feminine lesbians as women who do not problematize their femininity or who welcome passing, we ignore their contributions and struggles.

From the amazing “Femme Manifesto” again: “Refusing the fate of girl-by-nature, the femme is girl-by-choice. Finding in androgyny . . . too much loss, too little pleasure, and ugly shoes, the femme takes from the feminine a wardrobe, a walk, a wink, then moves on to sound the death knell of an abject sexuality.” She continues, femmes “are never heterosexual. Though they may traffic in men, they do not, cannot, will not take up a position within a heteronormative framework. Those femmes who desire masculinity in a partner prefer queer masculinities occupied with irony and ambiguity. The heteronormative man is inadequate in this department. The phallus he has seems not to be detachable.” (p.167)

From a frequent contributor to butch-femme.com: “But for many of us out here in cyber land, our entire lives are formed and created and lived WITHOUT A SINGLE DESIRE or attempt to be heteronormative, heteroqueer, het in any way, without the need to 'pass.' . . . What I'm saying is this: the desire to 'normalize' one's queerness, the desire to pass as het-anything, when one is -- by definition -- NOT het, is horrifying to me. And I don't share it in any way. I'd appreciate not having that forced on my very NON-normative body, sexuality, and desire.”

In response to these disavowals, i quote Butler again. She states that the refusal to identify with a position “suggests that on some level an identification has already taken place.” She adds that "heteronormativity remains a spectre in our identities if we cannot acknowledge our connection to heterosexuality." Assertions that the very fact of our queerness makes us different do not keep us safe. Wouldn't it be wonderful it it were that easy? Such assertions, in fact, make us less safe. For example, they make the fact that sexism still plays a role in butch-femme culture more difficult to recognize.

Characterizing queered femininity as reclaimed or rehabilitated by virtue of being queered might also suggest that escaping internalized misogyny is easy for those privileged with our gender identity. There may be a lot of proud fat femmes out there and many whose sexual agency inspires awe, but we are not alone in our struggles to love our bodies and sexuality, and those struggles do not begin or end with our queer ID's. To understand femme as somehow unique, or even as leading the way, isolates us from other feminine beings whose efforts to free their bodies and spirits are as authentic, creative, and powerful as our own.

Butler talks about intense disavowals as cruelties that we visit upon ourselves. Straight women and feminine lesbians are not made abject by their exclusion from our identity. We do not have that power. Their identities and ability to speak remain untouched. An unintended and often devastating effect of these assertions, these efforts to stake out a unique and unassailable territory, is to exclude other femmes who can not or will not repudiate their heterosexual pasts or their commonality with their heterosexual women friends and family members. These statements differentiate between femmes and feminine lesbians in ways that disparage the latter, creating in those who identify as both femme and lesbian an unnecessary conflict. Finally, in order to exaggerate difference, our femininity is often constructed as transgressive and performative in ways that many femmes do not experience.

The most prominent metaphor in femme cultural products is femme femininity as more performed, more ironic, more exaggerated and daring than straight or lesbian femininities. Femme as parody, even as burlesque. It’s a powerful metaphor that resonates strongly for many femmes. It continues the project of reclaiming femininity as powerful and allows for an inclusive understanding of femme since it points out the constructedness of gender. Unfortunately, it is also used extensively as a means of distinguishing femmes from straight women and feminine lesbians, whose femininities are understood as less ironic and transgressive.

There is an expression of this metaphor in “A Femme Manifesto," which claims that "femme is the performativity, the insincerity, the mockery, the derision of foreplay – the bet, the dare, the bringing to attention of the suitor, the one who would provide her pleasure. The performer who demands performance in return, the player who brings pleasure into play. . . . On the question of style, femme science reviles any approach to appearances that is sincere. Femme science questions the dignity and wisdom of anyone who would wear pink without irony, or a floral print without murderous or seditious designs.” One remark I have heard a few times goes something like "if you set a femme down in a baby shower, she would stand out like a sore thumb."

Even if we try to avoid creating a cohesive cultural identity for femme, some of the metaphors and narratives we use to describe ourselves gain more currency than others. My understanding of how this works comes from Richard Rorty. People who make cultural products, artists and writers, in the process of their own self-becoming generate innovative language, new metaphors, which catch on because of a “particular need which a given community happens to have at a given time. . . It’s the 'accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need.'”

These creators found a self which the past never knew was possible, making those possibilities available for all of us. In a given historical moment, there are always a number of people working through the same cultural ideas. In describing the relationship of the work of Victorian philosophers and writers, Rorty says, “All of the figures of this period play into each other’s hands. They feed each other lines. Their metaphors rejoice in one another’s company.” This explains the prominence some metaphors gain over others.

In constructing femme as performative and ironic, we exclude femmes whose identities are not experienced as transgressive. In "A Woman's Prerogative," Marcy Sheiner, a sometimes passing femme married to a transman, talks about relaxing into her femme identity in mid-life. A former editor of On Our Backs, she said that in her past, she “lived and breathed lesbian femininist radical sex analysis.” Like many women at mid-life, she is looking again at the life her mother lead, reconnecting to the legacy of previous generations. And she is simply relaxing. Her family does not know that her husband is trans, and she benefits, in fact, she luxuriates, in the occasional benefits of heterosexual privilege. Now that she is older and in this relationship, she reports she can better relate to a childhood friend, a straight woman. She writes, “Now that I am in a monogamous relationship with a man, we’re talking about our loves with the same kind of synergistic understanding we shared when we were fourteen.”

She sums up: “I don’t feel like I am caving in; I feel like my natural self is emerging. It is no longer so imperative to achieve fame and fortune and/or transform the world, and that’s an enormous relief. Some of this mellowing, of course, comes inevitably with age. . . . Feminine qualities were forced on me as a girl, adolescent and young woman. Because they were mandatory and restrictive, they were oppressive. Feminism was a rebellion and a way out of the oppression, but certain aspects of feminism turned into a new form of oppression. My rediscovered femme identity feels neither oppressive nor rebellious, but integral to who I am.”