“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. To me femme is a gender identity; it’s separate from “girl” or “woman” and exists outside of the gender binary. To me, femme is so much more than a default category to throw lesbians/dykes/queer people socialized as female and who appear “feminine” into. My definition of femme is subversive, complex, and paradoxical. My favorite way to describe my own femininity is that it is a perversion of traditional norms of what is appropriately feminine. Yet, as a femme I find myself often times having to defend my choices of clothing or makeup to individuals who are unable to see my queerness, and who are unable to recognize the subversive nature of what I am doing with my gender and presentation when I put on a dress, loud lipstick, and torn stockings.

I see femme as something outside of what the media, and mainstream culture at large attempts to label as feminine. As such, the existence of “straight looking” or heteronormativly beautiful lesbians on television shows or in movies does little to make me feel seen as a femme. In actuality when the label of femme is attached to these sorts of characters seemingly without their own identification with the term I feel even more invisible. It is as though my identity is being misused or misrepresented to the majority of society. While I would agree that the media is full of images of feminine lesbian I would wholeheartedly disagree with anyone who attempts to argue it is propagated with femmes, and I can’t tell you the last time I saw a queer femme in media that wasn’t independently produced.

I certainly don’t want to be an identity gate keeper and tell others what “femme” needs to mean to them, however I see people using it all the time on and off the internet without seeming to have any real conception of what the term means to many, or where it comes from. Instead it is so frequently misused simply as a code word for ‘feminine.’ It’s just hard for me to watch a word that I feel such a deep and personal connection to be so misunderstood. So I guess I’ll end this post with a question again, do you feel as though as a femme you are seen in the media? Do you feel femininity as being subversive?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under 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.