The Diversity of Femme

by GUEST BLOGGER on 6.15.2011 ·
in BEAUTY,BODY IMAGE,DISABILITY ISSUES,FEMINISM,GLBTQ,GENDER
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This is a guest post by Hexy. Hexy is a sex working, Indigenous, non-neurotypical queer femme living in Sydney. She is owned by one small and indignant urban rabbit with far more personality than he should have. She blogs infrequently over at hexpletive.comon queer issues, disability rights, sex worker rights, Indigenous issues, feminism, and anything else that strikes her fancy.

This is the speech I gave as part of the Diversity of Femme panel that formed part of the Camp Betty festival held in Sydney over the Queen’s birthday long weekend. The panel also featured four other femmes discussing their thoughts on the topic: Iz discussed her thoughts on being young and femme, and being femme and living in rural area, Gretchen discussed her relation to femme as someone who identifies as essentially androgynous and performs femme as deliberate drag and also discussed her invisibilisation as a femme dominant, Jade discussed her identity as a tomboy femme and a femme largely attracted to other femmes and discussed the relationship between femme and identity politics, and Stella discussed femme and ageing and also discussed her history as a lesbian separatist and her journey to femme.

The panel went really well, and I wish I’d had someone taking notes of all the fascinating questions people asked during the Q&A section at the end. You’ll have to make do with just my speech.

Hello, and welcome.

We’re here to talk about the diversity of femme. I’d like to start by cautioning everyone present not to make assumptions about the nature of femme. Don’t presume you know what femme is for any particular person… what makes them femme, how they feel about the label, why it appeals or doesn’t. Femmes are very diverse and, as you’ll hear today, we have very different reasons for identifying the way we do. For the duration of my speech I will use feminine pronouns when I refer to femmes: this is a mark of my personal preference for myself, and I do acknowledge that not all femmes identify as female or use feminine pronouns when referring to themselves. I’d also like to note that while we come to you as a diverse collection of femmes from a range of backgrounds, we acknowledge that five people cannot possibly hope to represent all the diversity that exists within the range of people who identify as femme, and that there are many different kinds of femme who are not represented here today.

This panel is presented by Sydney Femme Guild. The Guild is an queer feminist collective based in Sydney which works for the promotion of femme solidarity and visibility. We work to combat femmephobia everywhere we find it, to fight femme invisibility, and to celebrate femme pride. Our membership is open to all femme identified people, and we also have associate membership open to femme allies. We’ve organised a few events in Sydney, including the Femme In the Frame Conference, the Love Boat Mardi Gras Recovery Party, and the Hanky Panky party, as well as participating in high visibility queer events such as the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. We also try to maintain femme presence at regular events on Sydney’s queer calender through what we call “femme mobbing”, organised through our e-list. We meet roughly monthly.

So what is a femme?

I can only answer for me. My definition is that femme is a queer gender oriented around performing femininity… however high or low. I’m a pretty lazy femme, and one of my motivations for putting together this panel was to raise a little awareness around the fact that femmes don’t all come in the vintage pin up high femme model. Those femmes are fantastic, and a lot of them have done some great work for femme visibility, but I think it’s damaging for femme diversity to have such a narrow image perceived by queers in general as “what femmes are”. I’ve heard people say that someone can’t really be a femme because she wears jeans sometimes. I’ve heard of people scoffing when someone identifies as a femme because “they aren’t into all that vintage shit”. These sentiments don’t just strike me as ludicrous, they strike me as the kind of thing that causes a lot of insecurity to individual femmes, and erases femmes who don’t fit into that model. I know that since I found the femme label (and experienced that lightning bolt moment of “that’s me!”) I’ve since spent a lot of time worrying that I’m “not femme enough” simply because I don’t live up to other people’s expectations of the label. Recognition of the fact that femmes come in all flavours, and representation of a variety of femme role models who illustrate the diversity within the identity, would reduce this anxiety.

One of the ways in which I don’t fit the standard model of femme is that I’m a domme. I’m a sex worker who works as a professional Dominant, and in my private life I primarily take the dominant role in BDSM play. Femmes are often conceptualised sexually in relation to our real or perceived partners, with the stereotypical partner of a femme being a butch top. The femme is assumed to be a submissive bottom who is solely butch oriented. Femme dommes who are not solely butch oriented are erased, invisible in popular queer imagination.

Now, I like an attractive butch as much as the next femme, and the right butch might even have a chance of getting me to bottom from time to time. But with the majority of people, I want to be on top, and my attractions are to a wide variety of people. Most people, however, see femme and presume bottom or sub. You’d think that kinksters would be a little more aware of this kind of diversity, but it’s sadly not the case.

Having one’s sexual proclivities marginalised isn’t just problematic because it limits the number of people attempting to get one into bed. Any femme can tell you that being constantly read as the wrong sexuality (as people insist on reading us as straight) is a disempowering and invalidating experience. Being told again and again by the people you experience as your peers and potential love interests that your gender presentation and your sexual orientations and kinks are incongruent, even if it’s not blatantly stated, can make you question yourself. It can lead to low self-esteem about those leanings. It can make you feel like you’re doing either your gender or your orientations incorrectly.

Another way in which I’m a bit of a femme minority is that I’m Indigenous. I’m a member of the Wiradjuri nation, which is the largest tribal area in NSW. Indigenous femmes and other femmes of colour exist, although we don’t seem to be that common. Femme is largely perceived as a white identity, and if you ask your average queer to picture a femme, I’m fairly certain that the image they’d conjure would be white. Femmes of colour often have to fight doubly hard to have our identities recognised, as one of the racist tropes women of colour face is the denial of our femininity. Women and femmes of colour are stereotyped as being masculine and unfeminine, and often portrayed as being unattractive as a result. As someone who is read as white, this is not something I have experienced a great deal of, but it’s definitely something experienced by my darker skinned sisters.

I have experienced a general ignorance about racial and Indigenous issue in queer and femme communities, and an expectation that anti-racist activism be considered secondary to feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-femmephobic activism, when queer femmes of colour often experience our identities to be one holistic piece. It is an impossible request for a femme of colour to separate her experiences as a person of colour from her experiences as a femme or her experiences as a queer, and it is unreasonable to ask us to prioritise racism last simply because it is not something that affects white femmes. Significantly, this attitude promotes the idea that femme is an identity that cannot co-exist with an identity of colour, that one must choose between being a person of colour and being a femme, or that being femme is a “white thing”. This drives femmes of colour away from femme community, from femme organisations, and possibly away from femme itself as an identity and a self-label. If femme communities and organisations are to acknowledge and embrace the diversity that exists amongst femmes, we must make an effort to be deliberately inclusive, to work to have femme viewed as something other than a white identity, and to acknowledge that working against racism should be something done by everyone.

As a femme of colour who is read as white, I’ve experienced a lot of white queers simply misracialising me. Queers who know quite well that I’m Indigenous will ignore this fact, either through their own white privilege, through refusal to correct their ignorance of Indigenous issues, or through a kind of blindness where they cannot see past my skin. While recent years have seen an attempt by many Australian queer communities to address issues of internalised racism and become more inclusive of racially diverse members, they often still remain white centric and exclusionary to people of colour. The only answer to this is for every member of these communities to actively address inclusivity as a priority, to work at addressing their own internalised prejudices and biases, and to aim for a diverse community as an ultimate goal. I strongly encourage everyone here to take the time to read a little of the awareness-raising work being written by some of the amazing femmes of colour and other queer women of colour, even if most of it is coming out of the US, where there is a far more established femme of colour community than there is here. Hopefully we’ll start to see some homegrown voices soon.

In addition to racial marginalisation, I experience marginalisation as a person with a disability… yes, I like to stack the ways in which I am a minority. While the queer community gets points for being more aware of invisible disabilities than other communities I have been a part of, femmes are still generally conceived of as being able-bodied and neurotypical (a term I use to mean people with brains that fit what society says is the normal model of how they are supposed to work). There’s an air of perfection that comes with the stereotype of femme, and a severe mental illness doesn’t seem to fit with that. Having an invisible disability means that people who encounter you tend to presume you’re abled until it’s demonstrated otherwise, which can cause a lot of stress as you feel you’re expected to perform to abled standards you can’t live up to and anticipate inevitably being the cause of disappointment or embarrassment. As you can tell by my language, there’s a lot of internalised stigma around disability.

I don’t want to sound entirely negative… as I mentioned earlier, the queer community is one of communities I’ve encountered that seems to be doing the most work on recognising people with disabilities, including people with mental illnesses. A lot of people within the community, whether or not they are people with disabilities themselves, are actively challenging their own ableist assumptions and prejudices, and working to be inclusive and accepting of other people’s capacities, capabilities, bodies and minds. A lot of people are working to build communities and spaces that are disability inclusive, that do not alienate people based on different capacity, different bodies, or atypical neurology. This is to be commended. But, of course and as always, there is still some way to go.

Much like femmes of colour, femmes with disabilities are stereotyped as being unfeminine. A wheelchair is not seen as a feminine accessory, and a display of mental illness symptoms are seen as unladylike. When our disabilities are visible, we are perceived as breaking the model of perfection that femmes are expected to perform.

So how can queers and queer communities combat this and adopt a spirit of inclusivity that embraces femmes with disabilities? The first step is to address one’s own internalised ableism. Of course, this is an enormous step that never really ends. One should always be questioning one’s own assumptions about disability. When you meet someone, regardless of how perfect they seem, never presume that they are able bodied or neurotypical. Be understanding of people’s differing limitations. Ask for how you can support people with needs different to your own. When you are running a community event, make sure you make it accessible, and actually ask members of the affected communities what that means. You’d be surprised how often people think that their venues, spaces and events are accessible, only to find out that they actually do not fit the needs of the people who are planning to attend. Support visibility of femmes with disabilities, and other queers with disabilities, as members and representatives of our communities. Acknowledge that this is an extremely difficult demographic to stand up and be a visible part of, as the stigma inherent in disability says that you are weak and failing if your body or mind are seen as deficient or broken. Also acknowledge that some people with invisible disabilities will never come about about being a person with a disability, and that they have the right to not disclose.Recognise that people living with disability are every day demonstrating their strength in navigating an ableist world that is centred around able-bodied and neurotypical people.

And that’s the message I’d like everyone to take away from my speech today. The world we live in is not only homophobic and femmephobic, it’s ableist, racist, whorephobic, sexist, transphobic, sizeist, classist, colonialist, gender normative, heteronormative, and enforces a whole bunch of other isms that I’ve probably left out. It is inevitable that some femmes will experience intersecting marginalisations in at least some of these areas. Femmes of colour exist, femmes with disabilities exist, trans* femmes exist, femmes of size exist, femmes of varying class status exist, sex working femmes exist, femmes of all sexes and genders exist. Femme is a wonderfully diverse identity that encapsulates a range of people from a vast selection of differently flavoured other identities. I think that’s just grand, and something we should be embracing, not ignoring.

To sum up, let’s keep the vintage high femme. She deserves some praise. But let’s also elevate and acknowledge her sisters who have received a little less attention, who may not be as immediately recognisable as performing a stereotypically femme gender. All femmes are deserving of recognition by our queer community.

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