Image Transcript by Unorthodoxica in the People’s Accesibility Server:
Let me tell you what femme has meant for me and what it could mean for everyone. Let me stretch the word.
Let's say that femme is dispossessed femininity. It's the femininity of those who aren't allowed to be real women and who have to roll their own feminine gender.
Rolling their own is what cis-femme lesbians did in the fifties. By class and by sexual preference, they were dispossessed of real womanhood. For what woman is complete without money or a man? So they learned how to improvise, how to sew; how to turn a thrift store sow's ear into a vintage silk purse.
Rolling their own is what contemporary femme dykes do. Invisible in straight spaces and frequently trivialized in queer ones, they must voice their femininity in a way that does not get shouted down or ignored. No easy task.
Rolling their own is what drag queens and trannies do and have always done. For what woman is complete without hairless skin and a cunt? We too learned how to improvise. and when we were mocked as caricatures of real women, we often became skilled caricaturists, owning the insult, engulfing it.
And this is what femme gay men do, too. Dangerously visible in straight space and often ridiculed in gay male space, femme gay men take shit from all sides. The straights dish it to them because they're visible. Second-wave feminists dish it to them because they're both feminine and male, and have thus sinned twice. Other gay men dish it to them for acting like, well, chicks.
What these groups share, aside from a fondness for eyeliner, is the illegitimacy of their femininity. That's how I understand femme: badass, rogue, illegitimate femininity. It's the femininity of those who aren't supposed to be feminine, who aren't allowed to be, but are anyway.
Second-wave feminists used to slander both feminine dykes and transsexual women as "female impersonators.' And this is true. What they missed is that female impersonation is what femme is. Femmes can only impersonate real women because we are, by rules beyond our control, not...
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