foxteeth & flora

Hilma af Klint, Group VI, Evolution, No. 14, 1908

3-2-1

3 copies

2 storage methods

1 off-site

from “Rogue Femininity” by Elizabeth Marston

published in Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme, ed. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman (2011)

excerpt 1:

I’m proposing that from now on, we all use the word femme to describe every wolf, every feminine rogue. No one is born a rogue; you become one by learning to break the rules. Femme is a move from dispossession to self-possession. We’re not allowed to be real, so we’ve figured out something else to be, something new—and that something is femme.

“Something new” isn’t the way femme has always been seen. Both feminine cis dykes and transsexual women have often been accused of trying to disappear. But often, the femme has no interest in disappearing. All that’s happened is that straights and lazy-minded queers have mistaken her femme-ness for conventional femininity. She becomes invisible not because she’s trying to be wallpaper, but because no one’s looking for her difference.

excerpt 2:

[Passing is a] privilege, but it still sucks, even when it saves you from oppression.

I’d also argue that passing is still femme—still radical, still political. If a femme is someone who has been forbidden to be feminine, then any time a femme does femininity, it’s an unauthorized copy. Passing is as radical as printing money, as downloading music. We femmes are gender pirates. Arrr.