It sounded like the commenters in this thread were worried about turning into a derail, so I thought I’d open up a new thread. Nothing articulate yet, but I am experimenting with femininity these days (ask me about my socially-sanctioned hair-removal fetish), and so, you know, go for it:
Just like Femme is a noun, for me and many other Femmes out in the world, regardless of who we choose to partner with, Femme is our gender.
and
I will say that my being a woman is influenced by my sexuality as lesbian, and my gender as Femme, as different from the feminine gender presentations of straight women … it’s very concretely different, and while there are commonalities, I am getting really sick of being taken as straight because of my gender as Femme (even in LGBT spaces).
Did you go regular, Brazilian or Sphinx?
No, we haven’t gotten there yet. No heels, either. I don’t think I’ll ever get further than lazy-ass femme, but it’s still an enormous change from conventional male cues.
Is “Butch as a noun” forthcoming, or am I gonna be a derailer here too?
Sphinx?
Do you have any idea how long it takes to put up these posts? I could be microwaving myself a burrito right now.
Amber Hollibaugh spoke at the first Femme Conference in SF last year, one of the things she said that really hit home for me was (and continues to be), “I didn’t want to kill myself before I came out as a lesbian, it was only after I came out as a femme and was rejected by my community that I wanted to kill myself.” (paraphrase)
I don’t feel this way all the time, but every once in awhile I just want to remove all my labels but Femme, because I feel like I don’t belong in the lesbian community, nor I am wanted there.
Not all of the time, but pretty often, this is my experience.
omg. What the heck is a sphinx wax?
Wikipedia it, Evil Fizz. Wikipedia is always your friend.
I must have seriously made it, piny just quoted me in a post ;)
(Sorry: I meant to just express quiet astonishment at wikipedia’s thoroughness, not be a jerk to E F.)
Sphinx, the hairless cat.
Brazilians usually leave a little landing strip or triangle in front. Sphinx goes all the way. Meow.
Now that my first silly post on this thread is out of the way *smile*
I find my identity as femme to be something I am constant working on, not just because it is something I want to do, but because it can be something I unfortunately have to do.
I am lesbian, and identify with the lesbian community. I am also from an upper-middle class background (we had two, albeit small, boats growing up, swimming pool, trips to europe, etc) and so am very much a yuppie (guppie?) and an overeducated one at that, and so I know my performance of femininity is in accordance with that class background (look at the rates of anorexia for that class and higher).
However, despite loving the lesbian community, I do feel often sidelined by it. I am either assumed to be straight more often than not, OR rarely I do sometimes get my sex questioned.
I am not trans in the slightest, but I was an athlete all the way growing up (particularly swimming) so have an athlete’s body (particularly a swimmers body) and all the women in my family are tall (I am 5’10″ and my baby sister is even taller). Throw in makeup etc in a gay club, and I’ve been asked if I were trans.
It’s interesting within the lesbian community how performances of gender are turned around, to where if one doesn’t have portions of masculinity in one’s presentation, one’s sex gets questioned (and hence, one’s membership within that community). A performance that would be considered the epitome of ‘womanhood’ in a straight club, gets that very womanhood questioned in a queer club.
Furthermore, as femme, I am assumed then to want a butch partner, which I don’t, as I prefer other femmes, which often doesn’t feel as welcome a preference. Maybe that’s just me and my paranoia talking of course :)
So, for me, Femme is very much about doing BOTH gender and sex, as much as it is also about NAMING my gender. Existing as both a femme, and a femme that prefers femmes, as well as negotiating the class markers of femininity, makes me very aware of how femme is both who and what I am, but also what I do.
Clearly, I am out of touch with my pubic grooming vocabulary. Somehow, I got the idea that a Brazilian referred to taking it all off.
I think I want “lazy-ass femme” on a t-shirt.
Nah, evil fizz, a Brazilian refers to leaving just enough to cover with a thong (ie the Rio clothing choice, supposedly according to the stereotype).
I used to go for the bikini when I could afford it as I living with my parents … now I can’t, dammit *grumble* bloody grad school *grumble* … though after graduation, I am SO going back to that …
Gee, I like this topic. For me, one of my favorite things about coming out as a dyke is that it freed me to be femme, without that feeling like I was caving to heterosexual gender dynamics. I could shave my legs and wear heels and frilly skirts without it being perceived as “to attract a man.” I think this switch was mostly in my head, but it sure was exciting.
Maybe that contradicts what the commenter above was saying, because Femme isn’t my gender separate from who I’m attracted to, or who I want to attract, but is a chosen identity that interacts with all my other identities in complicated ways.
Dunno whether I have a point or not… I just want to hear more about fem identity and thought I’d talk about mine. More?
Ooo, you’re tall. I suppose at some point I’ll stop flirting with you in comments, but it’s much fun. Ahem.
More on the topic? I much like this idea of femme as a noun, as an identity in its own right, rather than just as a modifier for something else. As a transwoman and a femme and a native Texan, growing up was kind of hard sometimes. (Okay, most of the time.) For years my grandmother fought with me about looking too feminine/not masculine enough. Then I came out, and we had the same goddamned fight, except this time I wasn’t feminine enough. Gah. I’m not going to get into detail here, but I got pretty much every stupid bigoted question you might think of.
These days I like the me I am pretty well. It helps a lot that I met a woman who loves me madly and thinks I’m sexy as hell, even with the nonstandard plumbing. And I finally get to be the person I wanted to be (knew was somewhere inside me) way back when I was ten or eleven and I first learned there were such creatures as lesbians.
lol Moira, I’ve known you are taken for a while now hon … no reason to stop flirting though, as we have the freedom of knowing it’s going nowhere :)
Plus, given I am desperately single right now and have been since last summer, flirting is the most action I have had in MONTHS!
Would be glad to help you here, Sarah, but methinks I’m not your type. ;)
Since I came out eleven years ago, I’ve been told that I’m femme. It didn’t seem to matter that for a lot of it I was trying to be soft butch in short hair, jeans, and flannel shirts. Or that I’ve played sports my whole life and think of myself as all rough-and-tumble. Butches always picked me out as femme, which worked pretty well since I’m mostly attracted to butches. (In light of the next thread, I should probably qualify that I’m attracted to lesbian butches.) About a year ago I was in a space for a few weeks where it felt safe to experiment with femininity in a way that it never had either growing up a girl or as a woman in the adult world. I found that I liked the attention I got for it and I liked how it made me feel. It’s been interesting to come out as femme at 32 years old. Very little about me has changed, though. I still pretty much dress the same. I don’t wear makeup or heels. I refer to myself as a low-maintenance femme. I like “lazy-ass femme” too. It feels right to identify this way.
Femme was a huge struggle for me when I first came out as a dyke- I experienced, as Emma Rose mentioned above, a sense of freedom that I could play with femininity without the ickyness I’d always felt when it was assumed that my femininity was about ‘getting a man’. That sense of freedom faded into a sense of startled hurt that unless I looked and acted sportier, or a little more masculine, I would be continually mistaken in dyke bars for a straight girl with a really, really bad sense of direction.
But then, I don’t know- eventually it seemed like my other identities (visually freaky, openly kinky, activist, feminist, loud) were far more controversial in the mainstream lesbian community than my femmeness alone. While I appreciate that femme is (or can be) a radical identity, I no longer feel like it’s the most radical thing I have to offer the world. I do put effort into trying to make the lesbian community more open and accepting for myself and my lovely femme sisters, but these days I’d generally rather sit around pondering how to teach young queers the confidence to create their own physical & social worlds than sit around pondering how to get a bunch of conservative lesbians to accept me.
EF, my mom is an esthetician with years of experience, and I didn’t know all the variations had different names. She just waxes where people ask her to wax and calls it a Brazilian if it goes past a bikini wax. And I fully just got waxed, so this is kind of amusing.
I’m finding these threads fascinating, but what about those who don’t identify as butch or femme? Are there terms besides “lazy-ass femme,” or is it one or the other, at least for some people? (I’m not very educated in these matters. I’m going to go back and look through piny’s older posts so I can understand better.)
I will say that if I identified as femme, I would definitely be a lazy-ass femme. I don’t even like showering a good portion of the time. I only bother with waxing because I find the sweat accumulates there when it’s hot and makes me itchy.
I’m kind of shy about posting this, so sorry for posting in a thread that I probably didn’t have any business in posting in.
flirting is the most action I have had in MONTHS!
Oo, can I flirt with you, too, then?
I would be continually mistaken in dyke bars for a straight girl with a really, really bad sense of direction.
Well, there are those. My one sorry attempt at actually meeting a woman in a lesbian bar: I look around the bar and pick the one prettiest woman, to my eyes, there (well, what other criterion can I use, since I don’t know anyone?). I wait for her to play pool with seemingly everyone else in the bar, and finally get my chance to buy her a drink. She accepts, and, drink in hand, almost the first thing she says is to talk about her husband. So much for that plan.
but what about those who don’t identify as butch or femme?
That would be me (as I said over in the butch thread). And, definitely, if I had to get typed as femme, it would have to be “lazy-ass femme,” given that I don’t like to do any of the work involved in being femme.
I’m happy to admire other people being femme, though.
prairielily, maybe piny will do a ‘general how do you ID’ thread next. ;)
i relate to this so much.
i’m not sure when i started thinking about ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ as nouns, but a year or two ago, it suddenly clicked for me that femme is my gender, and everything just made more sense after that. i imagine just as many people read me as straight as ever before (until they talk to me anyway), but at least i have a ready (and confident!) response to friends who used to say “you can’t be a dyke, you’re too girly” — i’m a femme dyke, thank you very much. and i stopped playing the am-i-queer-enough game (which granted, was mostly in my head). i think it just sort of freed me up to take ownership over my gender & gender expression, and really distinguish between cultural messages/programming about gender & what i actually like.
i don’t know what it’s like in other areas, but i don’t know a lot of other dykes around my age (early twenties to early thirties) who particularly identify with butch/femme. we joke about portland “dyke style” — a sort of grungy indie rock hipster uniform. age seems to be the dividing factor– most of the older dykes i know who are 40+ identify much more strongly with butch/femme. the same seems to apply to gay/lesbian vs. queer — the older women i know are for the most part very uncomfortable with the term queer, the younger women seem to prefer it, and many are pretty hostile to being called lesbians.
i know a lot of that is just the way the communities have evolved over the last few decades, and obviously i’m generalizing somewhat, but i’m curious what other folks’ communities are like.
femmes i have met have done more for my respect for feminine women, & femininity, than anyone else, hands down. & that is saying a lot.
I like the idea of femme as a gender in of itself regardless of biological sex. It’s sort of like adding a color to the self-identification wheel.
I think some confusion comes from the number of people who use it as a modifier. I wouldn’t personally identify my gender as femme, but if the scale was thus, I would say I am femme (particularly in my circle of friends) and a friend of mine is butch, and that doesn’t indicate either of our sexual orientations.
I think that’s an important side note for femme as a gender; I personally don’t that it should indicate sexual orientation. Oddly, one of my genderqueer friends insists that if a biological male identifying as male is femme he MUST be gay, and I think that’s really doing a disservice to femmes and men.
People take the “attracted to opposites” a little far, I think.
I’m curious, though, if some of the femmes here wouldn’t mind expanding (no obligation, but I’m nosey so I’ll ask), how do you think the identification of femme [full stop] and femme [other qualifier] interact and are distinguishable, or are they? Are we in rainbow land where self-identifiers are semi-transparant and thus femme and other identifiers interact and become a third color (my gender is TEAL!)?
I like the idea of self-identifiers and self-descriptors being semi-transparent, but then I like things that are semi-transparent, so that might be a personal failing.
So, you’re saying you’re not femme yourself then Linneaus? Bugger!
Oo, can I flirt with you, too, then?
Of course Lynn, I am of the opinion that the more flirting, the better! :)
(sorry to everyone about the OT thread drift here)
oops, that second line of ‘my’ text is supposed to be blockquoted too … that’ll teach me to leave formatting till the end …
Would this be considered an awesome community with Piny and the awesomeness of the postings? Great to have you back, I missed you.
I came to this discussion late but have strong feelings about it, so I apologize for the long post.
The gender issue in the lgbt community is complicated. Even though I feel comfortable being gay with other gay people, gender stereotypes are a part of gay life. I have felt the most undervalued and discriminated against because of my gender in gay friendly spaces rather than in more traditional situations. I have never had trouble with the straight people I know accepting my looks and presentation as “lesbian.” I think that this is because the people that I choose to actively come out to tend to be liberal to begin with and they haven’t been socialized in the gay community so they lack its gender biases about appropriate presentation.
I dress in a femme manner. I love pretty clothes and like high heels better than flats, but I usually wear tennis shoes and pants to go to a club. I don’t want to dance for hours in high heels, and skirts and a femme appearance seem to invite groping from the icky segment of men at gay clubs.
Almost every time I have been at a gay club with friends I get hit on by men who don’t believe that I’m gay. Interestingly enough, if I’m with a gay male friend most of these men don’t approach me. Instead they ask him about me as if I were an object. At other gay events outside of clubs, I have also had other gay people question my “lesbianism” because I don’t dress like a lesbian. The odd thing to me is that being feminine isn’t something I perform. I would never identify as femme. I didn’t change my gender identity and appearance after coming out, and I don’t consciously try to dress in a “girly” manner. I wear makeup and try to look nice when I will be interacting with other people, but I also go to the grocery store in my work out-clothes with my hair in a ponytail. I would not get any comments about the way I dress if people didn’t know I’m gay.
The worst problem that I have encountered is that people in the gay community often identify being feminine with being meek and wanting someone to take care of you. I had a woman who was handing out gay feminist magazines treat me like an object without even realizing what she was doing. I was wearing a skirt and makeup and with one of my friends who was wearing pants and no makeup. The woman assumed that we were together and didn’t address me at all. She gave my friend a magazine and asked her if she wanted one for her girlfriend even though I was standing right in front of her with my friend. The woman assumed that because I was the “femme” I was the “girlfriend” and that my friend was in charge and the natural person to speak to. I didn’t say anything at the time, I don’t think the woman realized how she was treating me, but it made me feel like I became less of a person with agency to other women because of how I dressed.
When I first saw the proposal (in the trannychasing thread) that femme is a gender, I was dubious. After discussing the idea with my roommates, I’m starting to get it.
I do have a question, though: if, as one roommate asserted, “butch” and “femme” have certain expected aesthetics, activities and behaviors, what is “femme” behavior? Is it really the passive, appearance oriented, simpering stereotype? I doubt it, because in my experience, femme feminists are anything but simpering.
Again, femme is not a set of behaviors or clothing or anything that one does- it is a gender in and of itself.
I am femme, because it is who I am, my lover is butch because it is who she is.
There is no one one way of being butch or femme, anymore than there is one way of being (or performing) man or woman.
In my experience, a lot of people in the gay community expect women who identify as femme and “feminine” men to be passive and play the “woman” in a relationship. This certainly doesn’t mean that woman shouldn’t identify as femme only that there is a lot of confusion about what a femme identity means.
I am not an obvious lesbian, but I don’t think about my gender often enough to identify as femme. I don’t feel a meaningfull difference from other women in terms of gender.
Maybe gender identity is about how we construct ourselves in realtion to other people? Gender becomes imporant when it defines an individual in terms of differences or similiarities to other people in his or her social group. One of my friends who is gender non-conforming explained that he identifies more realily with women than men, but doesn’t consider himself a woman who was born in the wrong body. Instead, he thinks of himself as between genders. Gender is complicated and clearly seperate for sexual orientation, but if a lot of stereotypes and missunderstandings exist around sexual orientation even more exist around gender because unless people do not conform to normal gender categories in social groups, they usually don’t think about gender unless prompted.
Bluestockingsrs:
Maybe this is derailing the conversation, but how do you know if you’re butch or femme if it isn’t as simple as desiring to adhere to a set of behaviors or clothing? What I keep reading on threads like these is that people like dressing like x, like doing y to their bodies and therefore identify as z.
I know there’s a spectrum of butch/femme, to the point where a 3d graph is necessary. Do you behave in a way you deem femme? How so?
I have encountered the “femme invisibility problem” firsthand once, and seen and heard about it plenty from femme friends, and it is both gross and baffling to me. Is femme one of the only genders that suffers from this? Maybe not, I guess any gender identity can run the risk of being conflated/obscured by some other more socially-predominant gender.
In the case of femme, I think it’s a combination of things: really pathetic dress-code/gender-expression rules that seem to hold sway in some gay communities, and people confusing queer femmes with straight women. The former problem is just annoying and disappointing — that you should have to dress a certain way to “prove” your sexuality, or as if sexual orientation is inherently linked to dressing a certain way or expressing your gender in certain ways, and definitely not others. Can we just put those myths to bed?
The latter problem is more complicated, I think. I mean, there are queer femmes who are also cisgendered women, straight women, etc. Most femmes I know who would say that “femme” is part of their gender would also say that their gender identity is female/woman, it doesn’t seem incompatible at all. I think the real problem is that the “queerness” of femme as a gender, as opposed to uninflected, non-femme woman as a gender, is not visible to a lot of people. This seems weird to me as I feel like any “gaydar” I have is pretty much devoted to spotting queerness and less-normative nuances of how people are doing their gender. I just don’t get it when someone thinks a femme friend of mine is straight — I’m like “what? you look totally queer to me.” And I don’t even know if it has to do with the more “obvious” gendered parts of the way they express themselves. It’s in the nuance. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with masculinity or femininity in attributes, or style, or expression. But I guess it’s not too surprising that a lot of people don’t get this.
There is also plenty that could be said about how invisibility is a huge problem for femme genders, but visibility is a huge problem for genders that look less “normative” or could be considered to be more “visibly transgendered” somehow, whether you identify as butch or trans or FTM or MTF — and that this visiblity is so often linked to intimidation and violence intended, systematically, to push people back into socially-approved boxes. I mean… I know a lot of trans women who are also femmes, who are pretty aware that the invisibility/visibility issue is TOTALLY a double-edged sword.
Holly, I would assume butch queer men also feel invisible in their queerness. Isn’t it the gender transgression that pings straight people’s gaydar, anyway? (As for what pings gay people’s gaydar, that’s another thread.)
Melissa, it makes sense that someone can behave femme in relation to other people, even outside of a butch/femme interaction. I’m also going to say that passive isn’t a negative thing, much like being introverted.
All the behaviors expected of a good girl that I remember from books my well-intentioned grandma gave me (caretaker in many forms, social butterfly, tactful diffuser of tense situtions) are either directives on how to interact with others or activities (baking, sewing, ballet). So in a very traditional sense, maybe acting femme is largely about how to interact with people.
That’s not gaydar, that’s just broken! Because like you point out, it’s confusing non-normative gender expression with being gay. And there are more and more straight people who get that too, I mean if you took a poll around here for instance, I think most straight-identified folks would have quite a good understanding that some gay guys are very masculine and if there’s something perceptibly queer about them, it’s not that their gender isn’t masculine.
Holly -
I would argue that femme as an identity exists both as a modifier and as a gender, shifting between both as context and the individual involved dictates.
Hence it’s more of a fluid identity rather than anything fixed, because not only does it depend on the individual articulating, but because its salience as an identity, and the manner of that identity, are dictated by context.
While Melissa says for her femme doesn’t really acheive a particular salience, because she doesn’t think about it all that often, it’s apparent (and I hope you don’t mind me read this into what you said previously Melissa! *smile*) from her prior posts that her existence as femme within the lesbian community DOES exist as something that she has had to manage in the past, enough so that she sees it, or rather the reactions of others to it, as problematic.
Femme as noun, femme as verb, and femme as adjective/modifier are all part of the wonderful complexity of what it is to be femme, as it shifts between all of these repeatedly for us, depending on who we are in a particular moment. It is only in hindsight that we can pause a moment to see how femme was operating for us, and as us, as something concrete and solid.
Or at least that is just how I see it :)
OT, but can I just say how much I am enjoying this thread? *smile*
Ok, why the fuck do there are always have to be labels?
This reads as one step up from high school cliques.
“You’re a lazy-ass femme, because you don’t work hard enough to be a true femme, but you’re not quite butch…” How is that better than trying to fit in as a jock, geek, cool kid, headbanger, cheerleader, freak, whatever?
Jeez, can we quit this already?
You know, the idea that one can just reject labels is a tad naive.
If one doesn’t want to be controlled by labels, then the only real way to prevent such is by owning the labels yourself, claiming from them what you will, rejecting what you don’t, shifting between them as context and who you are at a particular moment allows … they can end up empowering and fun.
Merely leaving them aside and trying to pretend they are not there just leaves them with all their power intact to be inflicted on you without you be able to do anything.
However, regardless of naivety, okay, sure, you don’t want use labels, then don’t use labels. But don’t go all prissy and demand that no one else do just because you’ve got issues with them.
Some of us like our diversities and differences. We think they are beautiful and worthy of recognition and celebration.
Oh, and things are different, because for us, labels can be inclusive and not exclusionary.
Well, Sarah, since I’m a straight man, I wouldn’t call myself a femme. :)
*smile* then I’m sorry Linnaeus, I think we may have to let the potential incredible romance between us quietly fall hon ;)
Darn.
Bartender!
That’s OK, Linnaeus, I can two-time Sarah to have a romance with you as well.
Now I just have to figure out how femme I need to be to catch Sarah’s eye.
lol, Lynn … that’s okay, I may be desperately monogamous in RL, but online I can be poly ;)
And yuppie femme *smile* not uber-femme …
Okay, this could get interesting. ;)
Cool, yuppie femme I think I can manage :-).