It means whatever you want it to mean, darling
So, Sincere “women and femmes” Kirabo included a link for the “femmes” part: a link to What We Mean When We Say “Femme”: A Roundtable. So let’s read it. It’s guaranteed to put us off our dinner, but let’s read it anyway. It’s from July, so not too out of date yet.
Femmes. We live in different places. We’re different ages. We have different gender identities. Some of us are people of color, some of us are white. In this representative sample, we are Autostraddle writers, or artists, or musicians, or educators, or all of these things. The only thing we have in common is that we’re queer and that, in our own deeply personal way, we breathe life into the word femme.
So the word is meaningless. It doesn’t name anything, because of the infinite (and oh so impressive) variety of femmes. Femmes have “different gender identities” but they’re all femme – can you make sense of that?
Come on. “Femme” is French for women; it’s a subset of lesbians; it means girly, or feminine. Except – wait! – it means that but in a special, new, complicated, thrilling, woke, correct, impressive, don’t you wish you were as cool as we are way.
When did supposedly leftist politics become so entangled in personal vanity and peacocking? When did it become just a way of saying “I’m special and you’re not”?
This shit is about as left-wing as Bonwit Teller.
But like so many other differences, we don’t agree on what the word femme means to us. This is the beauty of gender fluidity. We live in a world where it is totally possible to claim the same word as someone else and completely disagree on what the word means.
It means everything! And nothing! It means so everything and nothing that we can have round tables about it, and bore each other senseless discussing it!
But above all, it means we get to tell women how fucking conservative and useless they are, and to get out of our way.
There are people today who are angry, they think that only women should call themselves femme. They think that if you’re not a lesbian or bisexual woman and you’re calling yourself femme, you’re contributing to an erasure or appropriation of the history of lesbian and bisexual women. These people are talking in a really binary way. In my observation, it seems to be a generational thing. But the people who are most affected by these opinions are trans women or transfeminine people, and I feel like if trans women and transfeminine people are telling you that you’re doing something fucked up, cis women should listen to that.
Of course you do. That’s the whole point, isn’t it – telling women they’re wrong, and fucked up, and the wrong generation, and just generally awful, and should shut up or better yet go away and die. And it’s so radical and woke and wonderful to say that. It’s the best political idea ever.
On the idea that an older generation of people think only women should claim the word femme: I’m 36 years old and I find that kind of restriction on “femme” to be abhorrent and willfully cruel. No femme friends of mine — and I’m lucky that they are numerous — believe anything like that, and many of them are my age and older still. If they did, I’d dump them on the spot! The “erasure of lesbian history” narrative is weak and fearful, that’s all. If it takes you longer than a millisecond to know the answer toDo I want to be weak and fearful or do I want to be kind?, then I haven’t got time for you.
Right? Right? Right? Women are so shitty, aren’t they? They’re just the worst. We all hate them. Femmes are much better than those shitty horrible women people. Ew.
On a more positive note, I think of femme today becoming more inclusive as an acknowledgment of what already was rather than a new reclamation. It always feels new once you realize who you are and choose not to hide it! I’d love it if we all welcomed non-cis femmes into the light with open arms and a friendly “What took ya so long?” knowing full well the answer, and knowing how brave you have to be as a femme in this world.
Yes!!!! Let’s hate and banish all the cis women, and welcome all the non-cis femmes, so that there just won’t even need to be any women any more. They can just do all the cooking and toilet scrubbing, and let the rest of us get on with being awesome and woke.
***********
Damn, that’s only about a tenth of the way down the page. I’m not going to read all this shit.
But that’s where we are now – we’re at the point where people are calling themselves “femme” and shitting on women in the same breath. We’re at the point where people are pretending it’s the height of social justice to do that. We’re at the point where the Social Justice Coordinator of the American Humanist Association (really) rewrites Women in Secularism so that it’s about “women and femmes.” Maybe in a week or two it will be renamed Femmes in Secularism.
If I dumped every friend who disagreed with me, even on key issues, I wouldn’t have many friends left! I always thought it was more progressive to accept people as they are, even when they disagree with you. Now I find that the only truly progressive thing is to tell women to shut up, darling, you’re old, fat, and worthless.
But then, what do I know? In their world, I am a cis-woman, and that means I have no value at all. I have oppressed all trans people simply by existing in my extreme privilege (because, after all, I have the privilege of feeling comfortable in the way society sees me as a woman).
That does it. I’ve decided I will no longer be human, and I now declare my new identity to be lemur. From now on, everyone is to address me appropriately. (What pronoun is appropriate for a lemur, by the way?)
Le, lem, ringtail.
So, having read the article I’m still not clear what they mean by femme. Somehow I don’t think I’m the one missing something.
Well that’s why they had to talk about it for 374 hours without a break.
Flippant snark! The best kind!
Humpty Dumpty is truly the God of this age.
You have to love how blithely the Intersectionalists dismiss charges of erasure and appropriation that come their way. Erasure and appropriation are the greatest conceivable sins, and must always be treated with grave seriousness, and the accusation itself automatically establishes guilt because SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN TO MARGINALIZED PEOPLE , and there should probably be an international tribunal set up to handle them…
…unless the accused is an Intersectionalist; then, the charges can just be sniffed at and disregarded with no explanation. No self-reflection is necessary for those who were born being correct about everything. Taking “femme” from lesbians can’t be appropriation. Why? If you have to ask, you must be a privileged shitlord.
“Femme” is just the appropriation of what used to be called “femininity,” from women. (Of course, back in the day, not “performing femininity” incurred serious social penalty.)
I’m honored to accept iknklast as my first cis-lemur friend.
@9, can I have a cis-lemur friend as well? It sounds terribly interesting and daringly exciting. I’d be ever so much edgier.
[I know there are really deeply thoughtful and well meaning people who concern themselves with intersectionality and marginalised people, but honestly there are some terribly shallow folk and some out right phonies as well. It’s hard not to feel grumpy and snarky about so much of this and sometimes it’s even hard to tell who is who. For the record though, any slympitters reading this can fuck right off because you fall into the shallow (and often outright nasty) phonies on the other side of the line]
James, James, James. iknklst is trans lemur.
(And le is just as much a lemur as any assigned lemur at birth.)
Ok, I think I got it. Can I as a gender critical woman who conforms to gendered norms regarding appearance (hair, clothes, etc), can I just say that I am an agender femme and be instantly cooler and more marginalised?
Yes, because then you’ve joined the Correct Club. Which is not only the club of being correct, but is also the correct club to be in, because otherwise you are a TERF.
Yes indeed you can. As long as you’re not in any way cis, you’re good to go.
@The Great God Pan,
Ah, but our femme friend has an answer to your objection:
‘The “erasure of lesbian history” narrative is weak and fearful, that’s all.’
That’s a solid rebuttal, that is, and clearly distinguishes it from those other instances of erasure THAT LITERALLY KILL PEOPLE!!!
And, E. Harper, it’s us feminists (though I of course am now a lemurist) that kill the people, not the people that actually kill the people.
Angry disgruntled rednecks do not kill people, feminists with websites kill people. (Thanks, NRA, for the loan of your obnoxious slogan).
Quite right, iknklast, we’re the killers, with our insistence that it’s hatred of femaleness that underpins structural misogyny and wanting a word to describe the class of people who are subject to it.
Do let us know what pronouns you settle on, so we can refer to you respectfully in the third person. I’d hate to drive you to suicide by unwittingly using the wrong term.
Shit like this makes me despair. I’ve spent most of my politically conscious life believing that the endgame of gender politics was removing the notion of gender entirely—breaking that all-too-human need to categorise things that’s resulted in certain behaviours being considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. In my vision of society, it shouldn’t *matter* if some people who grow beards like to wear earrings and dress in pink and be in touch with their emotions (in fact all people should do more of the latter), and it shouldn’t *matter* that some people who lactate prefer to be firefighters or lumberjacks, and none of that should keep people from being assertive or self-confident or pursuing any skill or career that interests them. I always thought your plumbing should have about as much to do with your worth as a person as your eye and hair colour or your navel’s status as an innie or an outie.
But no; we live in a world now where well-meaning progressive people with beards and penises say they’re ‘femme’ if they’re sensitive and kind instead of being hyper-aggressive assholes, and where well-meaning progressive people with vaginas who don’t like pink or dresses or the thought of being homebody prom queens say they’re ‘transmasculine’. Instead of building a world where they can just be people, to live and die by their own auspices, we’re building a world where they’re—where we’re—all judged by the same old impossible standards that nobody’s ever been able to live up to.
It would be so much easier on everyone if we just broke the standards and let people express themselves however they wanted. But that’s not how our pattern-seeking brains work, I guess, so it’s back to reinforcing our mind-forged manacles.
That.
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