celebrities and butch-femme
Warning: completely fluffy post follows:
Maybe because my brain is still fried from the femme conference, or maybe because I read US weekly at the airport (it’s my constitutional right to read gossip rags while traveling), I’ve been thinking about celebrity butch-femme type couples. Poor Samantha Ronson is getting tons of shit for her plaid shirts and hoodies, and while I don’t love her fashion sense or find her attractive, I don’t think it’s fair for the Go Fug Yourself folks and their ilk to take her style out of the context of her gender and expect her to wear whatever they think young feminine celebrities should be wearing. I don’t care all that much about queer celebrities most of the time, but it would be nice if people could make an effort to understand just a little tiny bit about different gender expressions.
Anyway, a friend just informed me that she has purchased the people magazine with Ellen and Portia’s wedding pictures and I am so excited! I love the way the lines of Portia’s dress echoed the lines of Ellen’s vest, I love how happy they look, I love the cream. Even if they don’t ID as butch or femme I like seeing a romantic, idealized picture of that celebrated in pop culture. But some folks at feministing are unhappy about Ellen’s joke about Portia cooking and cleaning and “taking her off the market.” I like feministing for news but they continually take a one-sided, second-wave view of queer women as gender-free, oatmeal-eating, cuddling overall-wearers. Fortunately, there are some good comments in response.
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
I don’t think this is a “completely fluffy” post at all–”fluff” always gets to the heart of things, my dear!
You make some excellent points about the persistence of feminist misunderstandings of butch/femme (which is something that I think those of us who are immersed in queer culture can easily forget) and also about the way dominant media, etc fail to “get” butch/femme codes in celebridyke world.
FYI I wrote about Lohan and Ronson on my blog and I actually sent my latest post on lipstick lesbians, femme, etc to Feministing, at least in part because some people’s response to Portia and Ellen seems so unaware of lesbian gender and what it means for many queer women. We’ll see if Feministing posts it!