A few weeks ago I got to see my friend Mr. Kate at the Women Action and the Media Conference and we got to talking about gender (surprise, surprise). Mr. Kate and I went to college together, where we first met because I was wearing a t-shirt that said “feminist” in glitter bubble letters. Since we are sadly 4 hours apart by Chinatown bus, we’re continuing the conversation over email and sharing it with you here.

Maggie to Mr. Kate

I think that while our identities are different in many ways it feels really great and important to talk about what we do have in common, which is really having a strong emotional relationship to gender and feeling that it’s really central.

Sometimes I wonder if everyone feels this way beneath the surface, but we’re not talking about this stuff enough, or if other people just aren’t as shar-y as I am. (being an artist means sharing the hard stuff, i guess).

But then I do things like the butch-femme events my friend and I have been putting on. No matter whether the event overall is good, bad, or somewhere in between - afterwards, we’re both exhausted. And I wonder if everyone else is going home exhausted too, or if it was just another potluck to them.

It’s hard for me because femme id is often so contested, and then on top of that people often get very defensive about butch-femme, because they see it as this huge threatening thing that is dominant and is going to force them to “choose.” When actually, those of us who are inside of it, living in that dynamic or seeking it out, find that (at least among 20-40 something white folks in Boston who make up the majority of the people I hang out with, see in bars, etc) it’s a pretty rare thing for people to want.

But I do happen to fit pretty neatly into the categories of femme and femme who likes butches (not exclusively, but most of the time). No one has ever questioned my femme identity. My dyke or queer identity gets questioned all the time, as do my politics. But I do have a lot of privilege just because right now the way I enjoy and feel comfortable presenting myself looks pretty close to what a lot of people think a femme should look like.

I know you’ve probably had some difficult experiences with your identity being questioned and being in different spaces. Do you feel like there’s a space or community where all of you fits? Do you want that?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 10:23 am 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.