Their intentional gender expression
If you have been on the internet recently, then you’ve likely seen the phrase “women and femmes” floating around. Maybe you read it in this article from Everyday Feminism concerning emotional labor or maybe in this takedown of white feminism from Wear Your Voice. You’ve almost certainly seen it pop up on your Twitter or Facebook feeds, at least if you’re someone who has links to queer and/or feminist communities. While it might seem innocuous, the phrase has been irritating me for the last two years or so. Why? Because it is, to put it lightly, incoherent nonsense.
…Femme is a term that comes from working-class lesbian culture. It was originally used to describe lesbians who were feminine in their appearance and clothing, and sat in opposition to butch lesbians, who were masculine in their appearance and clothing. (If you’re interested in reading more about the height of butch/femme culture then I suggest reading Leslie Feinberg’s seminal novel Stone Butch Blues.) Femme was about femininity released from the chains of obligation to men and their gazes. It was a defiant and knowing femininity, performed for oneself and for other women, rather than in service of the heteronormative status quo, which maintained that women were naturally feminine, men naturally masculine, and that the only acceptable desire was between these two kinds of people.
However, modern day usage of femme is far more expansive: Now it’s used throughout the queer community by people of any gender and sexuality as a label to name their intentional, feminine gender expression. (You can read a little more about how some queer people define their femme-ness in these pieces from Autostraddle and Vice.) It is important to recognize that people who are both straight and cisgender (i.e. not transgender) wouldn’t really claim a femme identity, since being feminine is not the same as being femme. For example, when cisgender straight women have a feminine gender expression it’s simply “the norm,” not an intentional reclamation of femininity from the clutches of heteronormativity. Femme is an identity that queer people choose—it is not simply a description of a person’s femininity.
In other words it’s for lesbians and…men who claim to be “queer.” In other other words it’s yet another word that’s been appropriated from women.
Really? How many working class femme lesbians were being quaintly ‘performative’ rather than just not putting much energy into ‘performing’ butchness? Is there a checklist of costume/makeup requirements to distinguish between ‘the norm’ and ‘femmeness?’
Who knows, the important point is, it’s for “queer” people, and “queer” people ONLY. Everybody else is normie cis Karen boozhie white terf scum.
I went through a phase when I (male, thank you very much) was really into wearing dresses, around 2017-18, and everyone was like “Yay you’re queer.” I even believed them for a bit, but then I realized pretty quickly that “Queer” didn’t mean anything, so how was it something that I could be?
But nobody ever called me “femme”. Maybe I should feel left out.