the queering of femininity

“Femme might be described as “femininity gone wrong”- bitch, slug, nag, whore, cougar, dyke, or brazen hussy. Femme is the trappings of femininity gone awry, gone to town, gone to the dogs. Femininity is a demand placed on female bodies and femme is the danger of a body read female or inappropriately feminine. We are not good girls – perhaps we are not girls at all.”

-From “Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity”

Years ago when I first began playing with the boundaries of femininity, and queering it’s cultural representations I stumbled upon Chloe Brushwood Rose and Anna Camileri’s “Brazen Femme” anthology. The above quote has stayed with me all this time, and always served as a guiding force in my own construction of femme as something oppositional to conformity. In the last week or so I’ve seen a whole lot of people online in various places talk about “femme” lesbians, about how there are so many, how they are like straight girls, just a little different, and how they are overrepresented in the media, and it drives me through the roof. I’m so tired of the co-option of “femme” by people who have no idea what they are talking about, and are using it to simply describe feminine, heteronormatively attractive lesbians, as apposed to individuals who actually are claiming a queer femme identity.

I grow extremely weary of the dominant assumption that femme is a “gender normative” presentation, when in reality many femmes, myself included, view it as subverting dominant discourses of appropriate femininity. Read the rest of this entry »

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