A few weeks ago, I was shopping at
Buffalo Exchange when I came across a bright pink t-shirt. Normally, I wouldn't have bothered to pick it up. While I love a pop of color in my mostly black wardrobe, pink tends to wash out my ghost-white skin. But it wasn't the color that caught my eye, it was the word scrawled across the chest: "Femme."
As
a lesbian who enjoys makeup, dresses, crop tops, and
curling my hair (even though it's such a hassle), I'm basically
the definition of a femme. So this shirt felt tailor-made for me. But at the same time, I was a little irritated thinking about other people wearing it. Namely, straight women. Because, among the LGBTQ+ community, femme is a descriptor that can feel as inherent to someone's identity as lesbian, bisexual, or genderqueer. So to see the word emblazoned across a shirt that
was first sold at a mainstream store like Madewell and then eventually found its way to Buffalo Exchange was a little jarring. How many straight women have worn the shirt completely oblivious of the queer history it invokes?
Femmes have been part of queer history since at least the late 1940s and early 1950s, when lesbian and bisexual women (specifically working-class women) coined a term to describe the relationships they were forming: butch-femme. "Butch-femme relationships, as I experienced them, were complex erotic statements...filled with a deeply lesbian language of stance, dress, gesture, loving, courage, and autonomy," Joan Nestle, founder of the
Lesbian Herstory Archives, wrote in her essay
Butch-Femme Relationships and Sexual Courage in the 1950’s. While many argued against butch-femme relationships at the time (and sometimes still do) as being attempts to mimic heterosexual relationships, Nestle claimed that butch-femme couples terrified other lesbians because they were unwilling to hide. Unlike closeted lesbians who could pass for straight, butch-femme couples made queer women visible. "In the 1950s this courage to feel comfortable with arousing another woman became a political act," she wrote.
Femininity for femme lesbians wasn't just a look,
it was statement that they wouldn't bend to
anyone else's expectations.
Read more here: A Brief History Of The Word "Femme"
https://www.refinery29.com/femme-lesbian-lgbtq-history