Inspiration - What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable

Länk.

Unicorns and sparkling things everywhere! Det här är så vackert, magiskt och inspirerande att jag blir lite kär i världen. <3 Här får ni lite utvalda citat.

Rudy:
Femme is connected to emotional labor and healing. It’s based on the energy you put into the world, the connection you make with people and the care you have for them. It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity.

Aja:
Though I’m significantly tougher and infinitely less fussy than I look, I’d rather die than change how I dress in order to effectively communicate those things. People tend to assume things about women who look like me — that includes fellow queers — and the last thing I need is to feel like I have to constantly prove myself to strangers.

Mey:
I definitely think that for me, my femme-ness is tied a lot to my emotions. I use it to find myself and center my mind and my heart and, in a way, be my truest version of myself. If I’m not being a femme, I’m hiding more than just my fashion or my attitude or my personality, I’m hiding my essence.

Bryn:
When I use the word femme to describe myself, I’m trying to reclaim a way of living that isn’t defined by my assigned gender, but by my experience of femininity. I have always thought of femme as intentionally living as a feminine person.
/.../
Being femme is a process of unlearning the reasons to hold my tongue while being faced with the risk of speaking up.  

YAT-TA
I definitely think femme is tied to emotional labor. Femme labor looks like creating soft rooms of satin for your lovers, and laying underneath the carpeted ground as they roll around with their newly remembered, healed, and transformed selves. As you side-eye them (lovingly…) like, “you’re welcome.” 
/.../
Femme means that you’ve got some sensitivity that doubles as strength and you are down to aestheticize it, commune over it, or fucking fuck about it. 

Cecelia:
I use witchy things to care for myself and show other people that I care for them. Reading someone’s tarot is a way to remind them (and myself) that vulnerability is a measure of growth and strength. Lighting a candle and saying a spell for another femme is a strategy that reminds me how important it is to comfort and protect each other. When I didn’t have a personal understanding of the word femme and only understood my caring process through the traditional femininity I inherited, I felt fragile and lost. The differentiation between the two is, in many ways, totally arbitrary — but by taking the word femme on as a project, I was forced to actively investigate and take apart the ways that traditional femininity lived in my body. Claiming femme made me feel like an agent of my own experience, not a passenger.    

Alaina:
Femme for me feels like I’m finally settling into the way my body wants to be seen. When I first came out as queer, I butched it up big time, because that’s what you do when you’re a 16-year-old baby gay. And then I realized, that I love the way my thighs look in a dress, that I feel like I can take over the world when I do my makeup, and that glitter will cure all ills. I want to be the one who gets to ride on the horse and “save” the princess, and I want to do it in a skirt that does the Thing when I spin around. 


Och så några vettiga synpunkterna från kommentarsidan:

Alice:
Not to be that buzzkill, but romanticizing doing more than your share of the emotional labor, especially if you are the sort of person (like, for example, an afab person or a transfeminine person) who’s very likely to have been socialized to do more than their share of the emotional labor, is much more dangerous than aesthetic without politics. 

Cecelia:
my femme identity is not constructed as an opposition to butchness. My femme identity is constructed in relation to my socialization as a woman.

Joanna:
At least lesbian identity HAS a history while the rest of us look at history and only wonder, “Were they… ?” The word is evolving to embrace all the new identities and expressions that were never able to exist in that same history. So, it’s admittedly a little difficult for me to listen to the privileged tears.
Queer people are not “appropriating” queer language. We’re defining it.