In this edition: The love child of James Dean and Bettie Page, describing and defining (or not).  
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
I loved your comment, “femininity feels at some deep subconscious level dangerous, weak, and wrong.”  And I think that is why I cannot escape an identity that somehow involves femme-ness.  There is something about presenting in a femme way, which I call “girl drag” in my every day life, sometimes I also use the drag terms “en femme” and “en drab” to describe my presentation.  I’m not sure that I want to say that that “wrong” is exciting, but I like that strange feeling, which I can only liken to walking down a dark alley.  For me femme is never “safe” it involves skin and secrets and forethought and it is often about things that other people don’t see, like under garments or beauty rituals.  Masculinity for me is more about the outside, I think because I feel more that I have to prove my masculinity than my femme-ness, because femme-ness on me would make sense to the world at large, far more sense than some cobbled together transmasculine identity. 

I think that once I found femme clothes that fit is was very simple for me to be femme.  When I came out I knew that I was attracted to butch-ness and because of that and my taste for things feminine I decided that I must be femme, though I did go through a period that I call my “butch” summer.  It was not an identity that I voiced very often except when trying to find and date and get laid at that time for me it wasn’t performative or political.  Then I started wearing silver eyeliner and somehow things changed for me and I put desires that I had had for years into action, matching bras and panties, skirts, cleavage, jewelry, and later on a signature red lipstick (I still get compliments on it).  But I’m off track.

Femme felt good and I donned a campy femme-ness that didn’t require me to be thin because I wanted to give a nod more to drag queens than anything labeled “real womanhood”.  My body doesn’t do what I want it to and being fat has totally impacted that.  I have big boobs, which don’t really bind in any realistic way, but look great in a balconette bra.  Being fat never forced me into being femme, it was a love of drag queens and a retro sensibility, which happen to be the same things that have steered me toward masculinity.  I did go through times when I felt like I had failed as femme, because I felt so awkward and other femmes made it seem so effortless.  I always felt I was in competition with them.  I also think that feeling of failure stemmed from feeling incomplete or somehow wrong.  I feel more of a failure at visual masculinity than I ever did as a femme, but I’m less self-conscious about it, both fit, but in different ways.

I do like being seen as desirable.  Personally I know that I prefer being seen as desirable when I am presenting in a more masculine manner, which correlates to how people react to me, and how I perceive them perceiving me.  I also prefer to see desire in action rather than hearing about it.  Compliments put me on edge.  These feelings and reactions are part of what proved to me that femme was an intrinsic part of my identity because I could actually see how much femme-ness was for me and not always something I wanted or needed to share with the world, that it wasn’t just a phase I went through or something I put on to try and get laid.

How do you describe your gender?

really?  generally I don’t.  I have to admit that I don’t talk about MY gender all that often, at least not in any detailed way, but it just so happens that I was asked this question recently and my current strange quasi explanation is that I access masculinity through femaleness and I access femininity through some kind of maleness.  My masculinity role models lie in that James Dean, butch dyke vein at least as far as appearance go.  My fem(me)ininty is drag queens on crack and classic films.  I’m not sure if this could even make sense to someone who doesn’t know me.  I was once told that I wore femininity in the least feminine way.  It’s something about macho-ness, camp, and power.  I’ve described myself as the gay love child of James Dean and Bettie Page.  I’ve also described myself as hypergendered, which I theorize as the opposition of androgyny.  Mostly I cobble descriptors together: fag leaning, lipstick wearing, masculine identified, feminist, queerdo, genderqueer, fey, fattie.

But after all that I’m not really sure I’ve described my gender and really maybe that’s why I don’t talk about it, because language fails and because I want to reserve the right to be anything, because as my world and my desires change my gender morphs.  I would find it very interesting to as people I know to describe my gender.  I have a sneaking suspicion that a project of that nature would be a huge failure that folks would stutter in the same way I do, that people would fall back on identifying me as “mr. kate”.  My identity has always partially been constructed on being a person who is never identifiable from every angle, who encompasses contradiction and a good dose of gray area and flexibility.  (which of course exists in contradiction to my desire to be understood).

Also I live very much in my body and my body is not language, it is sensation and emotion.  I often feel a disconnect because I identify my gender in  the physicality my body and the act of being in my body and using language to describe that experience often distances me from the actuality of my gender.

How have your friends responded to shifts in your identity?

My two best friends, the two I rely on every day have taken to shifts in my identity like ducks to water.  Both either have personal or academic experience with gender and personal experience with me discussing gender, while this doesn’t necessarily make my shifty identification completely comprehendible it does add a great about of elasticity in our relationship, especially in relation to my gender.  I would say that without friends like this my gender exploration would have not proceeded as it did.

There are other friends, older friends, who don’t really know anything about my gender, but they know me.  They know the years we spent together as kids and I think that even without a sit down conversation they understand something intrinsic about me.  This is the main reason I haven’t broken out the genderqueer 101 with them.

In that land of people I know there are folks I discuss gender with, generally because we both have interests in gender and gender theory, and there are folks that I don’t.  I do not announce changes in my gender identity; I simply change my behavior to make myself more comfortable.  This can, and does, create awkward moments for me, but I also have to understand that no one can really understand my identity unless I tell them about it.  I don’t like to make proclamations because I’m never quite sure how I’m going to change, I also like the idea of keeping people in flux of belonging to multiple communities.

What kind of conversations did you hope to start (or have started) by creating the femme show?

What do you think about the act of organizing around a shared gender identity, especially about inclusively and exclusivity?

I find there are days when I think, “I don’t have time to put on drag” or when I have more dirty laundry than clean laundry, or when I feel like I’m not actually going to leave my neighborhood so I just put clothes on and don’t think about it, but on these days I often find that I feel really unsatisfied and annoyed with myself.  Are there times where you feel unsatisfied with your presentation?

What kinds of stereotypes and misogyny have you encounter in the community? (I recently had someone tell me that femmes were “girls who look like girls.”)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm 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.