Part 1,  Part 2

In this installment: Why sometimes I want to cry, body image, being seen, the performativity question, “queering” femme as value judgment, stories from the gay marriage office.  

Maggie to Mr. Kate

I totally agree that there is a lot of shared experience here.  Gender became emotional to me when I figured out how performative my gender was, learning that getting up and getting dressed was always going to be some kind of drag. That is such a beautiful way to put it.  Maybe the emotional connection to gender comes from making those choices, being connected to what you want or don’t want each day because each day you have to figure out what drag fits at that moment.

I explain away all these “feelings” by blaming them on what my mom would say is my over-sensitivity, or on the fact that I have to talk about my gender all the time because it’s my art and my (non-paying) job. But I think the real root of all this is that femininity feels at some deep subconscious level dangerous, weak, and wrong.  And to answer your question, it is hard to talk about.  When I started the show it wasn’t so hard, it was just a theme for a show - one that I cared a lot about and thought was important for our community, but it was still just a show.  Now, it’s everything.

About bodies:  It’s interesting to hear what you said about being fat, because I’ve heard fat femmes say that they feel they have to be femme because they’re fat (fat=curvy or voluptuous=feminine) and I’ve heard others say that, with pressure for girls to be thin in the very air, their bodies mean they’re seen as failed femmes.

I definitely have body image issues at times, which I often feel I need to keep to myself because I know objectively that I’m not fat, no one thinks I’m fat, and if I think I’m fat or don’t like my stomach/thighs/etc I need to shut up about it already.
I do get some healing from being seen as desirable, from putting my legs or other parts of myself on display and having that appreciated by the right people.

What kind of adjectives would you use to describe your femme-ness? I think it’s queer, it’s natural, and it comes from within.  I don’t always feel that my gender is performative.  If anything, I perform queer, layered on top of femme.  The feminine part of femme feels simple in the day to day.  But lately as I expand the boundaries of what I’m comfortable with it does start to feel more and more dangerous, more and more performative.  Short skirts, hair down, stockings, brighter and brighter lipstick - it all makes me feel very very conspicuous, both in queer environments and on the street.

My roommate and I were talking about the natural and internal parts - she doesn’t feel like she has some kind of internal sense of her gender and she feels invalidated sometimes when that gets stressed.  I think I talk about that part of my experience a lot because it sort of justifies it, I guess it comes from a defensive place.  So I guess I want to acknowledge that that’s not the only way.

How do you feel about the privileging of masculinity over femininity with-in queerness?
Um, I could write a tome on this topic alone! Like misogyny in mainstream culture, it’s everywhere.   I think some of it comes from queers (I’m especially thinking of lesbian/dyke/bi/queer id’d women here) rejecting the  femininity that their families and/or society try to impose on them, which makes perfect sense, but then it sometimes leads to a lot of  not-so-nice behavior or attitudes towards femme and feminine people.

what kind of gender role models do you have?
I’m not sure I have any, but that can’t possibly be true! I just got purple cat’s eye glasses with rhinestones, which a friend pointed out are a contemporary femme trope, if not a cliche.  And that has to come from somewhere.  Maybe the big glasses (and other styles and mannerisms that I’ve probably adopted without realizing it) come from all the femmes, queers and artists whose styles I admire.

I guess I don’t feel like I have role models because there was never someone I looked at and thought, that person is a femme, I want to be like hir. And lately I’ve been missing a femme mentor in my life, although that has more to do with butch-femme stuff than with my gender on its own.

I had wonderful activist role models when I came out, but they actually often poked fun at my nascent femme-ness, my knitting and ballet dancing. (”You’ve been wearing too many dresses lately,” “You need to learn to golf if you want to be a lesbian.”)  I didn’t know anyone who I knew identified as femme until I joined MadFemmePride, although while at Emerson I started to connect with some feminine queer folks who talked about visibility and stuff like that.

how exactly do you want to be read out in the world?
In most contexts, I want to be read as queer.  If I’m out in my very queer neighborhood and someone is curious about me and decides to look me over, I want them to be able to figure out that I’m queer. Part of that comes from me, and the sum of how I present myself, and part of that comes from them, that I want people to be open-minded enough to consider that someone as feminine as I am might be queer.

You said, I don’t think that I ever really had my queerness questioned, but I also presented in a queer or campy way that was usually very readable. It’s funny to me, but no matter how I present (and it often feels campy or queer to me) I get read as straight by most people.  Case in point - working in the marriage equality office, I dressed in circle skirts and v-neck sweaters, heels and scarves, a sort of fifties secretary gone wrong look. On long days when I wanted to be more comfortable I wore jeans and baby tees or organization t-shirts with the neck cut out, ballet dancer/flashdance style.  Inevitably, I’d be talking to co-workers a few months after they joined us, and they’d say “I thought you were straight for the longest time.”  And this is in a queer context, albeit one where a lot of straight people worked.

I sometimes feel that there’s a competitive aspect among femmes when it comes to queering femininity.  Maybe I feel it’s competitive because I feel inadequate about not being read as queer? And sometimes I feel guilty for being skinny (which I can’t really help) and having the aforementioned body image issues and also for removing some body hair and wearing heels and make up and so on. Another thing to feel guilty about is class privilege and being able to afford makeup and heels (although those things aren’t necessarily more expensive than markers of masculinity) and sometimes even paying someone to wax my eyebrows.

Questions for you…
How do you describe your gender?
What do you wish people knew about identities like yours? (interpret that as you like)
How have your friends responded to shifts in your identity?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Guest Bloggers, guest entries, 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.