Sunday, March 18, 2007

In Other News:

1. An online quiz just told me that I am a "plain femme" -- we'll deconstruct that another time, eh?

2.I had dinner with a wonderful new butch friend of mine, who blows my mind, and I hope will talk to me more about class, gender, race, and activism. I have so much to learn, and sometimes it is nice to hang out with folks who remind me of that.

3. I just had a conversation with my mother who honestly asked me why food would ever be stressful...STUNNED SILENCE...This from a woman who had her daughters, ages 14, 11, and 8 go around the dinner table and say how many grams of fat they'd had in a day. WTF? She has the most amazing selective memory.

6 comments:

ben said...

"She has the most amazing selective memory."

Indeed. What stuns me some times is just how little i remember at all. might be best that way.

H M FoodFreed said...

Plain femme, my derriere! Complex femme? Capable femme? Definitely. I have been doing some more thinking about how I can express the complications of my femme identity lately. Would love to share with you. Methinks it's time for more tea ...

Chris C. said...

Perhaps if we use "plain" not as in ordinary or humble or uncomplicated but as in those other senses, of exemplary, pure, evident, complete. Senses with which I might, in this case, agree. But that would depend on who was defining "femme", wouldn't it?

A pure, evident, complete, just plain femme to me is in no way simple or incapable. Oh no. Quite the opposite.

H M FoodFreed said...

Now I want to hear how *you* define femme, jackadandy! (as c and are in in the midst of what I suspect is a lifelong process of puzzling it out alone and with others). If I were a creator of memes, which I am not, or a creator of other people's blog topics, which I can't deign to be because that is *their* choice (though the veiled command is a femme's stock in trade ...) I would ask all the lovers of femmes out there to tell me how *they* define the term. Any takers? ;-)

Chris C. said...

Case in point: It is risible how predictably I respond to the patent femme "veiled command", lol. Yet I will not, and have never attempted to, define femme. I leave that always to the lady/person herself. Perhaps there is something wrong with me, but I feel no compulsion to create and enforce a Class Femme. Femme exists when she declares herself such and/or, for my own nasty purposes, as soon as I respond to her in That Way; that's all I know, and all I care. Seriously.

But please don't think this is willful callousness or dismissal. I am just as cavalier with my own ID. And with all ID's. Even though at the same time I respect the importance and role of ID's.

Is there a way to define a class or an ID without creating essentially a commodity and staking out the perimeters of a territory? I'm getting so unwilling to do this in my old age. I want to force us to hold the idea of "femme" or "butch" or what have you in our heads, feel it, affirm it, even be liberated by it, and yet not define it. Resist the urge and see what revolution, perchance, occurs.

And for some reason, some reason, I feel that it's femme that holds the key in this particular revolution, this resistance to definition, to hemming-in and circumscribing. Why do we have such a hard time defining femme, in particular?

Think about it. Refuse to define it, and see how that feels. I'd be so interested in your response.

Hm, I guess we couldn't call this a "veiled command", could we? lol

Am I making any sense at all? I should never attempt a comment when I'm supposed to be working... :(

Winter said...

My parents are similar. They're great parents in lots of ways, but around food -- nightmare! AS far as I can tell my mother has been on a diet for about 30 years and my father was always expressing anxities about my teenage weight. Both insist that they don't have any problems. Both my sister and I have eating disorders and my mother's always wondering why.