Attack of the Glamazons
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Hey! Did you know that “glamorous lesbians” is “not an oxymoron”? Thank the powers that be that we have the Village Voice to teach us about this phenomenon! This popped up thanks to my google alert and my Femme* Roommate and I immediately started reading it and sarcastically commenting on it.
I am so sick of pieces like this that proclaim the next trend in gender or queerness. Femme is in, femme is out, butch is out, “bois” are in, “futch” is in, butch-femme is history, butch-femme is the hot new trend, oh fuck, I give up. What happened to self-definition? Can we please have a real conversation about our lives, our communities, our genders without making up fake trends that jump all over people’s identities and lives?
“Uncomfortable with the het label “lipstick lesbians,” women within the cliterati refer to themselves as girls, or femmes, or just lesbians.” Lipstick lesbian is not a het-defined term. Some people define lipstick lesbians as specifically being attracted to other lipstick lesbians, perhaps because they feel “femme” carries an association with being attracted to butches, even on its own. More importantly, why bring up “femme” if you’re not going to even try to discuss some of the things it means and they many very good reasons (history, community, self-definition) people might have for choosing it?
“Glamazons began emerging from their clothes closets when Showtime’s The L Word premiered four years ago.” Um, no, obviously, as the article goes on to state, women like this existed and were the inspiration for the show. Either they were already out doing their thing, and inspired the show, or they were in hiding and came out after the show started. Which is it?
“The glamazon look varies by region. The L Word’s Angelenos are all flashy designer style and disposable wealth. In p.c. San Francisco, the femme, transgressive goth/punk aesthetic incorporates tattoos and brightly colored hair. Chicago ponytail girls bring a healthy Midwestern athleticism to their girl-next-door good looks.”
Sarcasm is our favorite sport in this household. Paraphrased conversation with Femme* Roommate:
“There is no one with tattoos or dyed hair in New York. Did you know that?”
“No, there isn’t, have you ever been to New York?”
“I thought I was in New York this one time, but there were people with tattoos there.”
“You were really in San Francisco.”
“Oh, it must have been a magic Chinatown bus that I thought was going to New York but really it took me to San Francisco.”
How ridiculous. That transgressive tattooed femme look is alive and well in Boston, for one thing, and I’m pretty sure you can find it everywhere. And I don’t know if we have “glamazons” here but I wouldn’t be surprised. Probably at some club I never go to.
“Glamazons, on the other hand, are everywhere. Academics call this the dilemma of the “consumable lesbian”; that is, the most palatable lesbian comes to represent all lesbians. This consumable lesbian is pretty, wealthy, stylish, influential, and feminine—but post-feminist and definitely not gender-transgressive.”
I do like this point, and I think we saw** it happen in the 90′s with the first round of lipstick lesbians as media darlings. But this article, especially as it’s in a straight-focused publication, is complicit in promoting a certain kind of feminine queerness to the masses.
Then there is a royally messed-up paragraph about how “At the same time the mainstream straight world idolizes glamazons, however, some lesbians are transitioning to men, or dressing like them, and calling themselves “bois.” She makes it sound like all the genders people express come from a big Claire’s store, but instead of sections for prom, punk, goth, and hippy, there are sections for different genders and lesbians are just running around trying things on for the heck of it.
GENDER IS REAL! To many of my friends and the people I love, our gender, whether it be fixed or in flux, has a profound impact on how we live. I imagine that the same is true for the women in the article, who may be very different from me but are probably just doing what’s fun and comfortable for them. How frustrating to see all of this so trivialized so we can talk for a few minutes about some dressed up women in a couple of New York City clubs.
*femme at the moment
**Ok, I myself didn’t “see” this happen, I was in middle school, watching Friends and being awkward.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
this article is so incredibly whack, though i absolutely thank you for bringing it to all of our attentions. you hit on most of the points that annoyed me, though what also got to me was this equation of “lipstick lesbians” or femmes, as being detached from a subculture and completely apolitical. i don’t doubt that for many people, no matter what gender one ascribes to, this is the case, but there is a large contingent of femmes (and queer folks generally) dedicated to a very specific politics when they claim “femme” (or butch, or trans, or genderqueer, or bi,…whatever) to ignore that is to denounce it and almost reposition “femme” as merely an aesthetic.
also? this sentence in here about how in “new-lesbian society,” whatever the hell that is, “even the butch is downright girly,” is so totally irritating and offensive to the large contingent of butches out there who might take issue with being identified as “girly.” i’ve known me a good number of butches and it’d be damn near impossible by any stretch of the imagination to call many of the “girly.”
village voice, why you gotta let a girl down like this?