Queering Femininity (the quick and dirty version…….)
May 15th, 2008 JennIn the last couple of months I have come to feel much more conscious of my femme identity – not necessarily because of the clothes that I wear, but because of how much skin I show and what skin I expose.
Currently I am covered in lesions of an unknown nature to my Western doctor. Some of them are small and some of them are quite large and cannot be hidden. At first I was terribly ashamed of them, trying to cover them up by hiding the parts of my body that they’re on. But now that almost all of my body is covered with these lesions, it’s difficult to hide them. And soon it will be impossible to hide. With the warm weather about to arrive, I do not want to sacrifice ample opportunity to have fun in short skirts and skimpy tops. So what’s a femme to do but to tackle the sites of shame that make me want to hide underneath my clothing?
In turning to my disability**/queer/femme politics, I have a lot to use to take on my body shame. It’s a bit of a matrix, a puzzle of politics and ideologies mixed together. So when starting to become conscious of this riddle it’s daunting to know where to begin. I begin with asking myself, what do I actually have to be ashamed of? I haven’t quite unravelled this answer yet but I have some guesses and sources to pull from. Read the rest of this entry »
