On New Years Eve my partner and I spent the evening at a gathering hosted by an acquaintance of ours. The evening was lovely, although slightly humorous as a soft butch in attendance spent the majority of the time staring at me-and granted I did have a lovely amount of cleavage, however I am confidant my boobs were not what drew her attention. Alas it was my being there with my partner that threw the poor kid for a loop. My partner is a transgender butch, and although ze doesn’t identify as male ze passes as a man nearly all the time. Sitting in our friend’s living room the lesbian in question appeared obviously confused as she looked from me to my partner, pausing to stare at my black triangle tattoo, and other clues to my queerness in attempts to determine what was going on, and if I was nothing more than a “hasbian.” Things shifted when my partner spoke of hir solo shows’ NYC debut – the performance is about “testosterone” and butch and trans identities. Suddenly she got it, and appeared visibly relaxed having solved this great “mystery” about what I was.

Because of the ways in which my partner and I are perceived by the world around us, it is frequent for us to pass even to queer folks, unless we explicitly out ourselves. As a femme who is erotically, spiritually, and physically attracted to butches and who feels very much part of butch/femme culture at times I feel a sense of invisibility based on the ways my partner and I pass to the world, especially the queer world. Within butch/femme culture there have been some very clear cultural ideas about femme invisibility and femme passing, as time goes on I see myself being able to identify with some of those experiences less and less. If you read any of the butch/femme canonical texts there is usually discussion about femme invisibility, and the power many femmes feel about how when on the arm of a butch, or otherwise out in public with a butch they are queered. In this way their queerness becomes recognizable because of the cultural recognition that there is something queer happening with the butch in question, and as such the femme is queered by association. That doesn’t happen for me, nor does it happen for many of the femmes in my life who are partnered to transgender butches and as a result sometimes I find myself feeling invisible all over again within a subculture I call home.

I certainly don’t have all the answers to this, other than I’ve reached a peace with myself, where now passing is something I laugh about more than I cry about. But I am still interested in the ways in which femmes have at times been read as passive, or only queered by association with someone considered more visibly queer (read “obviously” gender transgressive). As a femme that has never been my experience, my flamboyant femininity with tutus, boas, tattoos, and piercings is honestly more likely to get us queered at times- especially if we happen to be in the gayborhood— then again even when people recognize us as queer half the time they don’t know what to do with us. I know that this is a topic my friends and I talk about all the time, but I’m really curious about what other femmes perspectives are- especially if they are the partner of, or date passing butches are you the ones who queer public interactions? Do you pass as a straight couple? Is your butch/femme dynamic recognized by other butches and femmes? I’d really like to start a dialogue about this, because I think it’s an important part of understanding femme culture, and one which I think deserves to be explored in more depth——– so come on! What’s been your experience????

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Guest Bloggers, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.