Femme-and-inity

So, I've been meaning to write a post for a long time about femininity and femme identity. Tonight is the night for things that I've been meaning to do for a long time. I drove back from CoastalNewEngland today in the rain and gloom, in stop and go traffic. It is just so sad to be in first gear on the highway. I was up there for a wedding party, which was fun. I got home, and after about ten minutes tore my room apart because I realized that tonight was the night to polyurethane my bed, a task I've been putting off for six months. Then I got polyurethane all over my hands, and have spent the last two hours going to buy paint thinner (which meant getting back in my car which smells like dead cheese) and worrying about the toxicity of the things on my hands.

Finally, my roommate, B., told me to stop freaking out and to come eat her experimental stir-fry -- which was a good call since the last and only thing I'd had to eat was a v. good and bucolic diner breakfast with LOTS of coffee.

Ok. Down to business.

I think that one reason I've been putting off writing this series of posts on femme is that I think that so much of gender and gender identity is about performance and when I talk about this with people in my life it is in the context of my own performances, which you don't have access to, and so I worry that you'll get some warped view of me. Weirdness of the blogosphere.

So all of this started with Jackadandy's post and me saying that it got me thinking and also reading Katia's interview with Elizabeth Stark. So, if you want background reading for this start there.

In high school I would wear a skirt one day and three piece suit the next. I loved the double takes that I got from people. I still really enjoy the ways in which my gender performance counters expectations -- no one expects me to be smart and sexy, or butch and an economist, and I like being able to push back against people's expectations of me, or of women in general. My sisters are both fairly feminine -- Sister Esq. is pretty urban hipster, funky attorney feminine, and Sister M.D. is more posh and put together. Both of them put significant pressure on me in my teens to be more femme, and it's a blessing that I've never tried to compete with them on the femme-front, because for the most part it still feels like a tune I'm supposed to be dancing to, and find kind of catchy, but can only sort of hum along to when I'm not too distracted.
It's a role that I enjoy, and yet, in part because I don't really commit to it -- I always feel vaguely like a failure, or like a small child wearing her mother's makeup. I don't (and have never) shaved my legs, I invariably screw up my makeup or laugh too hard or my hair is crazy or something, something is wrong with my femme performance.

Which is why I found the following Stark quote so fascinating (stolen from Jackadandy):

"Femmes know how to make love to other women, to butches, to transmen. In my opinion, this is an art and should not be overlooked. Femmes know how to fail and succeed at femininity at the same time. We use our flaws, our fat, our hairiness, our loud mouths, our oversized brains and our excessive accessorizing to celebrate ourselves and those we love and to foment revolution."

To know how to "fail and succeed" at something simultaneously. This sounds like fun. I think it is also the failures and fractures within femme that lend it some of its queerness and I think that this is particularly attractive to me. One of my main problems with being mainstream feminine is that I end up feeling like my queerness is not recognized by the outside world and I want people to have to reconcile me with the me they think they see.

I also love the powerful sexual imagery of femme. The way that she has power over her lover and with her lover and the acknowledgement within queer communities of the art of femme lovemaking. When I wear a dress and walk around with TP, it is this power that I'm tapping into and bathing in. To identify as femme is also one of the only ways to identify oneself as desiring butches and transmen and to extent that gender identity/performance is all about performing desire, well it's in my best interests to be femme. I also love the ways I'm desired, the particular escutcheons and performances of desire, when I'm femme and the person desiring me is playing with some version of masculinity.

Chris (of Jackadandy, who I sometimes, probably incorrectly, call Jack) in hys post also noted however, the differences between role, identity, and label. In general, I agree with hys analysis. I would add however that the slippage between identity and label is very significant and happens quickly. It is far to easy for things that one identifies with to become "citadels of limitation", and I'm anti-that so I've also been reluctant to take on the identity of femme. On the other hand, I recognize that it is an identity and don't want to trivialize it by calling it a "role" that I take on from time to time. I'm also not entirely ready to never be able to able to identify as butch. Here are some ways that I am butch:

• I can and like to fix things.
  
• I love men's clothes, on me, and on others.
  
• I can open jars that are hard to open.
• I have broad shoulders, lift weights, and love my body best when it's jacked.
  
• I am a sometimes top, with a desire to unlock the pleasures and desires of my sexual partners.
  

So, I have no idea where this leaves me. Except that maybe I should go back to my high school ways, where I was either femme or butch and stayed away from middle ground. Of course the middle ground is also a pretty comfortable place at this point. In the end, I don't know what I'm wearing when I'm not in drag. The problem with this scenario is that it runs me smack dab into that "role" problem. My gender performance is, for me, a series of roles, but it also plays with other people's identities, and I don't want to "play butch" or "play femme" because that seems to undermine folks who identify with that. I think I mainly undermine that by being able to avoid the hard parts of butchness or femme identity because it's not what I'm doing full time.

I know that this is long and I've rambled horribly, and if you've read this far I'm impressed. Now, I'm tired and this might be the first in a series and I'll be able to hash this out some more - hopefully with questions/thoughts from y'all so I don't get lost in my own head.