Femme 5

[Recaredo Latreche]

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When I hear us plan the wheelchair accessible femme of color trailer park,

the land we already have a plan to pay the taxes on

See the money in the bank and the ways we grip our thighs back to ourselves

Originally published in Hematopoiesis Press, Issue 2. Copyright 2017 by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Used with the permission of the author. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

I have always been feminine. But only in the past few years have I called myself "femme." The difference stands not in abbreviation, but in queer coding. Unfortunately, many folks outside of the queer scene don't fully understand what femme means or recognize its distinct differences from feminine. But the differences are precisely why the word femme must exist in the first place.

To put it simply, "femme" is a descriptor for a queer person who presents and acts in a traditionally feminine manner, as explained by feminist media site Autostraddle. This might be a cis pillow princess, like myself, an asexual trans woman, or a gay non-binary individual, but all femmes hit upon two key aesthetic and identity-related traits: Being feminine and falling somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.

There is also a sense of reclamation when it comes to the femme descriptor. For many, it's about owning the stereotypes and expectations so often placed on women and making them our own. As Evan Urquhart wrote for Slate in 2015, "Intentionality is the key to distinguishing a femme identity from a traditionally feminine one."

Urquhart's point is that being femme isn't about acting feminine or "girly" in the ways mainstream society generally feels that female-presenting people "should" act. Instead, it's about subverting the expectations that women face purely for being women. This is why you will often see femme-identifying people presenting exaggerated versions of femininity over traditional, cookie-cutter, or preppy ones.

For me, using the word "femme" over the descriptor "feminine" is a key component in claiming my queerness. It's a queerness that has often, because of my bisexuality, been erased. This experience is one lived by many queer women and has arguably been discussed more and more with the rise of the internet, including a Twitter campaign by Huffington Post in 2014 that resulted in the hashtag #WhatFemmeLooksLike.

What's important to conceptualize about this quote and the narrative that it is fighting against is the division between gender and sexuality that is, actually, an important one. Although gender and sexuality can be undeniably and intrinsically linked, they are not one and the same. What we identify as and who we are attracted to are two separate constructs, and how we present ourselves physically often has little to do with who we are attracted to.

In Urquhart's same Slate article, a friend summed up the contrast of being interested in women and appearing feminine perfectly: "Being femme is about being authentic to what I actually like and how I actually want to appear, in spite of what my sexuality leads people to expect."

If we expect women who like women to present as butch and men who like men to present as feminine, we inadvertently reinforce gender binaries. This is not a slight against butch women, feminine men, or anyone in between, but rather a critique of the expectation so many people feel to fulfill these roles based on their sexuality.

In a comic for Everyday Feminism, artist Anna Bongiovanni explained the privilege in this binary: "We live in a culture that celebrates masculinity and demonizes and shames femininity and those habits don't go away in the queer community."

For those reasons, it is crucial to remember that a butch lesbian isn't usually playing into stereotypes of sexuality any more than a femme lesbian is playing into stereotypes of gender: Our identities are so much more layered than that.

So when it comes to feminine and 100 percent straight individuals contemplating whether they should self-describe as femme, I'd personally suggest steering clear from a word that means so much within a community they are not a part of. Ultimately, "femme" is about braking binaries. It's about subverting cultural expectations. It's about being more than one thing. It's about queerness.

Hood Rave is an attempt by two Black femmes, myself (BAE BAE) and DJ Kita, to create space for our overlapping communities to share physical space. I think a lot about the assertion I heard from Saidiya Hartman during a talk at UCLA that Blackness has always been queer.

Hood Rave is an ephemeral architecture, a structure of feeling that emerges in the gaps of institutional space, after hours, in darkened space. It plays off certain physical structures and technologies, including the sound system, colored lights, warehouse architecture, and open outdoor space, and uses them to create something that actively pivots away from white patriarchal hegemony. It is a space for Black queer people and femmes to play. As much as afro-pessimism might negate it, Black intramurality is real, salient, and productive of new realities. Collective Black culture saves lives. Strangely, the dominant culture that exists is a culture of individualization, separation, and confinement. How do we go back to the collective cultures of our ancestors and renew it through a queer, feminized interpretation of life?

My family is not supportive of my trans identity, and very quickly as a child, they tried erasing me as a femme by raising me as a boy. Most of my femme nurturing came from queer and trans femmes of color, elder trans women, and femme black gay men. They taught me how to thrive as a femme, to embrace and celebrate it. For many years, I felt immense anxiety and depression as a femme. The world is still very hostile to femmes and trans women. I still have my anxieties, but today, I am the happiest I have ever been in 31 years. Femmes are fierce, and we're slaying for vengeance.

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