June Cleaver : Femme Friend or Femme Foe

[Medusa]

Snowy- I hope you don't mind I made a tiny edit up there and changed it to "if you want to have this conversation "about the totem person of your gender" then have it".

I think it would be a different animal if Butches or Transmen wanted to start a thread to dismantle their ideas about June Clever without us being able to interact. I think though if they'd like to start a thread about how they think about Ward Clever or some other person who has been held up as the standard for masculinity, it's good.

Problem for Femmes is that we are so often conflated with straight women stereotypes so Butches and Transmen don't have a Butch or Trans person to look toward the way we do with June Clever. I do think that Butches and Transmen get conflated with biomen quite often but it's a different kind of invisibility than we deal with.

I think June Clever has come to symbolize the Martha Stewart of her day - "I can make a HOME and FAMILY like nobody else can!" along with other symbols like "pure", "right", "white", and "of a certain class".

I love me some Martha Stewart but she doesn't have the same connotations to me that June Clever does, mainly because of June being in a stylelized family dynamic on the sitcom.

Even my Granny said that "nobody lived like that in the 50s" when referrring to Leave it to Beaver!