November 25th, 2008 maggie
<div class=\"postavatar\">
</div>
Last night I dreamed I was at a dance teachers’ conference and I was late for everything and had packed for a femme conference (fewer leotards, more fishnets). I was wearing black lace stockings and those fishnet glove things on my hands, which I have no problem with but I would never wear. Then at the keynote the speaker was name dropping Dorothy Allison and Havalah and one of the organizers from the Femme Conference in Chicago were there. I was really confused as to what Dorothy Allison had to do with teaching dance and why the keynote speaker was friends with her. Also there was a donut machine.
Anyway, last week Johnny and I were talking about gender confusion (that is, the confusion other people experience when they look at a gender non-conforming person, not the personal kind) and how it works on couples. Johnny was saying that for hir and some of hir partners, there’s often an element of age confusion – Is that your son or your boyfriend?
I am used to being read as queer more often when I am with a partner, but when people read Mr. GF as a man that shifts. I think I am still more likely to be read as queer when I’m with her than when I’m alone, but my presence might increase her odds of being read as straight. (If that person has a heteronormative appearing girl on their arm, that person must be a man). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in musings | 1 Comment »
November 24th, 2008 maggie
<div class=\"postavatar\">
</div>
Thanks to our dear friend Johnny Blazes, who is just as busy as I am but a lot more together, you can watch Femme Show clips from 2007 and 2008 on youtube! Here’s a good one you might not get to see again, since it’s so topical. Bitches: Love is a Battlefield Bitches with Barrettes for president in 2012!
Posted in news | 1 Comment »
November 20th, 2008 Sassafras
<div class=\"postavatar\">
</div>
It’s funny to me that Maggie chose this week to write about invisibility, as it’s something I’ve been thinking a whole lot about recently. Two weeks ago my partner and I went upstate to a B&B for the weekend with the dog. It was the first vacation we’ve had in over 2 years, between moving cross-country, work, school, and art there just hasn’t been time for vacationing. We had an incredible time, but the funny thing was that we were passing as straight. That weekend the house happened to be populated by a straight couple who had been together 2 months (and were very awkward and who kept asking us relationship advice as we were the ‘old married folks’ coming up on nearly 5 years together) and a lesbian couple—who seemed very awkward about us.
Now, I feel the need to say that it’s entirely possible that they were just awkward people, and maybe it’s just my own issues with invisibility but it felt like something more to me. Even though I go through the world often passing as straight, and Kestryl and I nearly exclusively pass as a straight couple it’s not something that normally get to me…unless of course it’s queer people. I kept trying to get them to see me as queer! I’d drape my arm over the back of the couch taking care to position my black triangle tattoo within their line of sight; I was very obviously ready my new book Femmes of Power (which isn’t yet out in the states but is incredible—you can read my review of it here: ). I was practically doing queer gymnastics in order to be seen—–but no success.
In the end despite being invisible to the lesbians, it was an incredibly relaxing weekend, which was just what we needed. We spent lots of time walking around the property, reading, sitting by the fireplace, antiquing—which involved me coming home with a new vintage apron!
Posted in musings | 2 Comments »
November 19th, 2008 maggie
<div class=\"postavatar\">
</div>
Wow, it’s been too quiet around here. I wrote you a post last week about What Queers Are Carping About On the Internets This Week and it got eaten by a poor internet connection. Don’t worry, you didn;t miss much.
This post got me thinking about mentoring and community, but I can’t seem to think about that without thinking about visibility again. Lately the girfriend and I have been out at fancy queer functions in public. At the local queer theater festival, I stood with a femme friend and a new aquaintence, idly watching the gf in line for her free drink (muff divers and sparkling twinks were on the menu!). My friend said something about masculine women, and I noted that the girlfriend was chatting with the three older butches in line behind her. Look, I said, that happens wherever she goes, at work, walking her neighborhood, everywhere.
Maybe it’s my social anxiety, maybe it’s my personality, but I never feel like I instantly connect with people like that, femme, butch, or otherwise. Really, I think we just don’t see each other. And then there’s the way I guard myself in public. It’s one part New England reserve and two parts protecting myself from sexual harrassment and so on by keeping my head down. In my own neighborhood I am a little more open in my stance. So I guess I don’t know how much of this is me and how much of it is us.
It does happen sometimes, though. The girlfriend and I were on the train this summer across from an ordinary, feminine looking girl, who I wouldn’t have thought might be queer except that she was reading an anthology of lesbian African-American fiction (something like that – I forget the title.) She caught me looking at the book cover and smiled. I was queered by the presence of the GF, she was queered by her book – otherwise we would never have connected. Bittersweet.
Posted in musings | 1 Comment »
November 3rd, 2008 Sassafras
After our Boston show on Saturday night I made up my mind that I was going to buy a Femme Show shirt—only to discover that there were a lot of fatties that loved us! all the larger sizes were sold out!!!! i was pretty sad about it at the time, but left with a few iron on transfers and was determined to come back home and make my own shirt!
Of course crafty things never happen when you plan for them to so it took longer than I anticipated to get to work on this but now that it’s done I’m so in love! I haven’t talked with anyone other than the monthly exterminator today but I need to run to the post office to mail something to my femme craft swap partner this afternoon, and then Kestryl and I are heading to Target tonight so I imagine that I’ll get to have several conversations about “what a femme is” 
oh the back of the shirt has the iron-on transfer that lists all the summer’s shows
Posted in musings | No Comments »
