What is high femme? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I don’t really know what it means. People keep referring to me as high femme. I hear people call others high femme, meaning “very femme,” but I don’t know many people who identify themselves that way. Sassafras does, and ze’s going to write about it this week. Maybe I should have made hir go first, since today you’re going to get some ramblings from me and not a lot of education on the matter.

Last week, a friend who I totally think of as femme, although I’m not sure if she identifies herself that way, hugged me goodbye and said in my ear “you make me feel butch.” I was totally taken aback. “Why?” “You just do your high femme thing so well.” My reflexive response was “I’m not high femme.” I may have also said something like “that’s ridiculous.” Maybe she feels that I’m more femme than her and it brings out a different aspect of her gender in a way she enjoys. Maybe she was flirting, in a friendly way. But it made me worried that she felt butch by default, that I made her feel less femme, not more butch in a good way.

Lately I feel like I’m going further and further into my femininity, doing things in terms of appearance/clothes/makeup as well as relating to butches in different ways that a few years ago I wouldn’t have wanted. Is that high femme? I don’t know.

I’ve always had strong fingernails that grow quickly, which was great in seventh grade when I wanted long nails with light blue polish, or crazy multi-colored “french” manicures, but by high school I just couldn’t be bothered. In college my first girlfriend had this weird complex about nails and somehow it was impressed upon me that long or polished nails were the most final and imperative lesbian “don’t,” worse than purses or long hair, that (regardless of the glove-and-cotton ball trick) it signaled that you didn’t fuck your lover and that was not acceptable (which shows complete ignorance of stone identities).

Ever since then I’ve wished for weaker, less miracle grow nails, since I am always having to trim them. That task falls in the same category as flossing and plucking my eyebrows - things I want to do, but am always neglecting.

Then last week I noticed that the nails on my left hand especially had gotten long and looked kind of nice. I am thinking about keeping them long, at least on that hand, thinking about leaving marks on someone while ze’s fucking me, thinking about making a statement that femininity is more important to me than practicality or standards of what is or isn’t queer. (by the way, I just want to acknowledge that it feels really weird to be talking about my hands in public like this, implying fucking. For so many of us they are a sex organ, but one we get to wear outside our clothes and wave around all day long, a sex organ that can also say hello and type and knit and cook food and feed it to you.)

The fingernail experiment is just the latest of a long series of typically feminine things, mostly related to appearance, that I had once decided were not for me but have now adopted. Wearing my hair down more often, even when it doesn’t look perfect. Ponytails, braids instead of a bun. Lipstick almost all the time when I’m not teaching or dancing. Shaving my legs all winter. Matching underwear, even on days when no one is going to see it. Wearing heels to work, back when I worked in an office.

I’m not sure if this is high femme, but I feel like I am swimming deeper and deeper into femme, that the water keeps changing, growing colder, darker, but holding me up, safe, refreshing. Always, there is the fear that I will not come emerge from these dark, safe, private waters and be welcomed by my community, that I will not be seen or honored or liked. Always, there is the fear that I will be seen in competition with other femmes, that I will be compared to them, that someone will always be found lacking. The worst fear is that I will, without meaning to, make other femmes feel less feminine or less valid.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 9:00 am 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.