I love and support femmes so, so much. It’s so hard right now to locate yourself as a femme and as a lesbian. So much of what young femmes are seeing represented as just boils down to radical queer consumption, or straight liberal femininity repackaged and sold just the same. Femme has become associated with frivolity, with fluidity, with vagueness. Women who sleep with men call themselves femme for reasons I cannot even begin to approach. Meanwhile, femme lesbians are disappearing themselves into a broad queerness that tells us we should fix our attraction to other females. We’re told that we are regressive for desiring butches because they think that butch women are the same as men, somehow, and again for reasons I cannot comprehend. People assume that ‘femme’ is for all. Meanwhile, femme lesbians are searching for the women who came before us, begging for scraps like all lesbians do. It’s hard to see where the next turn it when everything is blurry and when there’s no road signs. I found myself in S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt, and in friends, and in my love for other women. I found femme in my anger especially, and continue to. I’m sure I’ll find that part of myself elsewhere in years to come.
If there are any femmes reading this, feeling lost or just kinda weird about being a gay woman and being femme and not being totally sure how to locate that, I’m there with you. I feel that part of your heart from miles and miles away. and I don’t have all the answers, but we as a community can rediscover what this means to us. We’re already here–we just have to sift through to find the words.
Something about this bugs me. Femme and femmeness hasn’t always belonged exclusively to lesbians. This term has long been used in the trans community and nonmonosexual community. As a pan/queer femme I am not determined by my partners, but by my own identity. And for the people saying they aren’t attracted to women who have sex with men…. Yeah maybe need to check your biphobia
That’s because “femme” belonged to what we would now call the wlw community back when it was coined, which at the time included what we would now call trans women, as well as what we would now call bisexual women and also lesbians. The ‘lesbian community’ at the time of the coining of the term explicitly included ‘women who sleep with men,’ that is, what we’d now call bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, women and non-binary femmes etc., as well as trans women (and often trans men) of all orientations.
The term was coined in its modern context in the fifties, and it wasn’t until the seventies that bisexual and trans women were pushed – sometimes literally violently – out of the lesbian community, and lesbianism became, in some communities, as much a political identity and a rejection of men (cis men, trans men, and trans women, who they still mischaracterize as being men) as it was a sexual orientation. Those people who, again, in some places violently ejected trans and m-spec women and trans men from community based on their gender identity or orientation only, have continued to try to police use of identity words like butch and femme since that point.
It goes without saying that the perpetrators of violence don’t get to use that violence to say ‘you cannot be what you are, you cannot use your identity words,’ they do not get to use a history of violence and exclusion to assert that ‘femme’ and ‘butch’ belonged only to lesbians as the term is currently defined; they conveniently edit out the fact that the lesbian community at that point included m-spec individuals and trans individuals, who, again, were violently ejected from community.
History reminder aside, I got no truck with people who reject trans folks, or use the word ‘females’ as a dogwhistle, or who exhibit such easy biphobia. Femme belongs to – wait for it – femmes. It isn’t a lesbian word except in that it carries with it in these insistences the history of the violent expulsion of m-spec and trans people from community for no reason except the internalized misogyny of those doing the ejecting and the bigoted assertion that association, even potential association, with anything other than women (as defined by those perpetrating the violence and the ejecting), makes a person politically, physically, and spiritually unclean somehow. So yes, it is a lesbian word, in that it carries with it the history of harassment and violence against some of the founders of the modern movement by some of the other founders of the modern movement, including the woman who founded Pride. That should be acknowledged more, and it isn’t.
^^^^^^
QueerAnarchism 