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The 1990s ushered in new understandings of femme gender and sexuality, and Toronto was an epicentre of the queer and trans femme dialogue, cultural production, and political organizing that activated this culture shift. On Our Own Terms explores this dynamic period through archival materials and nearly 50 oral history interviews with over 25 femme narrators. Drawing on this rich archive of ephemera and stories, the digital exhibition explores femme identity, friendship, sexuality, and world-building within the landscape of 1990s Toronto. 

‘Femme’ is a term that can mean many different things to many people and the narrators in this project had creative, complex, and sometimes ambivalent relationships to the idea of femme.  Historically, ‘femme’ is an identity marker that emerged from North American working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s and 1950s, and both femme and butch are terms that have circulated widely in queer culture. Notably, starting in the 1960s, femme was also a term used by trans women of colour in Harlem’s Black and Latinx-dominated drag and ballroom cultures. When we began this project, it was our sense that some combination of these diverse lineages and the marginalization of femmes (and others) in the lesbian-feminist communities of the 1970s and 1980s had catalyzed a renaissance of queer femme culture in the 1990s. Through this decade and into the early 2000s, there were numerous cultural projects, both individual and collective—art projects, books, performance scenes, nightlife events, community spaces and movements—that focused on reclaiming queer femininities and articulating femme “as a gender experience on its own terms” that was informed by but also exceeded lesbian histories. A significant number of these projects came out of Toronto.  

Femme-led cultural production offered spaces for connection, for play and sexual exploration, and for activism and queer world-building. Femmes have initiated a disproportionately large amount of community organizing but remain under-represented in community archives. Our project strives to begin filling this gap, and we are so thankful to each of the narrators who shared their stories to help us make this history visible.  

This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.