Being Femme: Identities and Affinities
“We cannot begin with a definition; we cannot offer assurances of any kind. For ‘fem(me)’ is not an identity, not a history, not a location on the map of desire. […] The voices we record do not cohere.”
— Lisa Duggan and Katheen McHugh [1]
A new sense of femme began to emerge in the 1990s: femmes were unhyphenating 'femme' from 'butch,' disentangling it from ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian,’ and insisting that femme identity be understood “on its own terms.” [2] In telling about this era, the narrators of On Our Own Terms described themselves as outlaws, as subversive, as armoured, and as belonging to a lineage of other femmes. ‘Femme’ remained a term to describe gender expression and adornment, sexual style and modes of desire, and other ways of being and moving through the world. Femme took particular shapes as it intersected with class background, sex work, race and ethnicity, body size, and participation in other subcultures.
Performance photo of Christy Cameron.
"[I felt] femme but always, like, dirty femme. One of my first tattoos is the word 'dirty.' [...] The punk ethos or the post-punk ethos, and feeling frustrated by the constraints of femininity as it was presented to us. And again, never the desire to be pretty, but femme. And, like, angry, dirty, and just... not necessarily clean lines and perfect hair and perfect makeup and the perfect presentation."
"I don't think being femme is about muting your appearance. [...] There was this rule that you're supposed to take one piece of jewellery off before you leave the house. It's a stupid rule... what I do is I put on an additional piece before I leave the house because I want to make sure that I have all of the metals represented, that there is some glitter, the colours are there. We’re not supposed to mute ourselves. And I think that's what being femme is; femme really is about, you know, adding glitter to the edges. Like throw sparkles on it. Like a strobe light and a diva fan or something."
Photo of Monica Forrester.
Reflecting the desire to describe femme in less stereotypical and more nuanced ways, the narrators often turned to storytelling and metaphor to express their experiences of femme. One narrator used the metaphor of black figure skates to describe femme identity. Others used colours, shapes, and imagery from nature as ways to describe what femme is. Some femmes described feelings of aggression, fearlessness, strength, sexiness, and care as central to their sense of femme. And many femmes used stories about encounters with others—lovers, family members, friends and community members—as well as encounters with oppression to illustrate what femme identity looks and feels like. Often, femmes were first given the word “femme” by friends or community members, and came to understand themselves as femme through kind and generous exchanges with others.
Toronto Women's Bookstore staff with Dorothy Allison.
text
"I continue to choose the word 'femme' to identify myself, whether I'm in the queer community or not in queer community, because it signals a lineage. It's kind of a cultural identification for me. [...] By lineage I mean all of the badass femmes, like going back like generations, here on Turtle Island, beyond. [...] I'm claiming, in this cultural lineage that I imagine, even those who don't necessarily choose the word femme but operate, you know, in the world through a kind of femme magic."
Allyson Mitchell and R. M. Vaughan
Femmes formed meaningful connections with those who shared their identities, like other femmes, as well as those who shared their experiences in different ways, such as sex workers, gay men, and straight men of colour who were targets of whorephobia, fat hatred [3], and sissyphobia [4] alongside homophobia, racism, and misogyny. Within these friendships, femmes found spaces of joy, emotional support, political solidarity, creativity, and collaboration as they navigated everything from break-ups to street harassment to becoming cultural producers with their friends by their side.
Kathryn Payne and Debra Anderson
"The weird, perverted high femme girls, we all kind of found each other."
"I think it was a competitive space within that small community. But you had to kind of subvert those expectations and be like, 'I'm not a threat... put on my eyelashes. Here's my make-up. Here's my...' And that was something: sharing. The physicality of sharing those tricks and sharing that space and wanting to shine the spotlight on them, I think helped undermine that, what was tense or competitive. It kind of subverted that and opened a space where it could be more cooperative and more celebratory of each other."
"Women were very instrumental within the trans women sex work community, especially queer and even non-queer women. We kind of just kind of fed off of each other's femininity. They taught us something, we taught them something. We taught them to be bold and outrageous."
Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay
Femmes drew strength, inspiration, and joy from the communities they were part of, but these communities could also be sources of pain, as they remained fraught with social hierarchies that structured the broader world. Femmes in our study shared stories of experiencing oppression, prejudice, and exclusion within queer community and relationships, as well as their own imperfect but wholehearted efforts to address these issues through their organizing and art. In the 1990s—pre-internet, pre-LGBT rights—spending real-time in physical spaces was fundamental to participating in queer community, and being in queer community was so important that it sometimes meant enduring the flawed human behaviour that is produced by structural inequalities.
Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri
"We were looked down on. Yeah, it was a more femmephobic time. Femmes were seen as less legitimately queer [...] I never had this happen to me, but other femmes often described being stopped as they entered a gay bar and asked if they knew that they were walking into a gay bar. [...] That was just like one moment that reflected a larger suspicion that femmes were not really queer, could not be trusted."
"[Pretty Porky and Pissed Off] was a shelter in an extremely fatphobic culture and within our psychic experiences of shame. We would talk about really honest things like desire, like dieting or desire to be smaller, and all those things that come along with that kind of embodiment. It was a really important place to share those experiences and to love each other and love each other's fashion and feed each other and have food together and influence each other."
Anjula Gogia (centre) and May Lui (right) tabling for TWB at Pride
Understandings and practices of femme have shifted substantially since the 1990s, and the ways the narrators identify has also shifted over time. What remains consistent across the interviews was a sense that femme identity is relational and expansive. Femme is a gender identity for some, but was more often described as a more holistic identity and, in some cases, a cultural identity. Femme was understood not through what it is but what is enables—"a kind of femme magic." As another narrator put it, "there are nine million galaxies that are in femme."