Women steal everything
Like a leopard going back to a rotting carcass, I’m going back to that “Roundtable” on what we mean when we talk about femme, even though I said yesterday I couldn’t stand any more of it. Maybe if I just limit myself to the parts where the awesome femmes throw shit at women, I can get through it.
In my experience, many cis women of all ages feel that my identity as a non-binary femme somehow invalidates theirs. Lots of people like to consider themselves radical without actually being able to make any space for people coming from a different place. My experience of femininity is linked to empathy and understanding that to be feminine is to be less safe in this world, so I understand the need to have spaces that are exclusionary out of respect for our right to protect and value ourselves. But there is a large community of feminists who are misleading in terms of how inclusive they’re actually willing to be.
But being “inclusive” isn’t the goal, nor should it be. Black Lives Matter isn’t required to be “inclusive” of white people in the sense of including them as Black. Feminism shouldn’t be required to be “inclusive” of people who aren’t women. Feminism is about women. We’re allowed to say that.
On the idea that an older generation of people think only women should claim the word femme: I’m afraid I don’t even get that argument, possibly because I’m not super smart but also possibly because that argument is bananas? Cis men are described as “butch,” so does that invalidate an entire self-identified group within lesbian history? No? They get to keep that one? It’s almost like the femme identity… is invisible. Sorry. No, kidding, but I think femme has always been relevant. I don’t think we’re reinventing or reclaiming the word, I just think it’s not been seen.
Right. Nobody saw anything until last week. Feminists never had a clue about any of this until people born after 1999 explained it to them.
The word femme, for myself specifically, is a departure from traditional femininity. I see femme as the rebellious teenage daughter of femininity. Femme is the process of taking the feminine words that were placed in my body, words like “soft, weak, quiet” and transforming them into: “wild, loud, confident.”
No, that would be “feminism” actually.
Femme invisibility is still very real, and extremely difficult to navigate. And I do think that a lot of it has to do less so with any sort of purposeful femme erasure in queer communities (although that is extremely prevalent), and much more to do with the fact that it’s an identity being co-opted by folks who aren’t queer. I think a lot of our discussions around femme invisibility in queer spaces center around masculinity, and those are valid and important discussions, but I’d love to see the conversation change and try to look at the ways our identities have been taken by straight (white) women who want cool points.
Bingo! Women fuck up everything. Cunts.
And that’s the last one – the “Roundtable” wasn’t as long as I thought.
After reading this I have even less idea than I did before why Sincere Kirabo thought it was a good idea for him to say that Women in Secularism is about women and femmes. Femmes appear to despise women, and reject all identification with them, so why would Women in Secularism be about women and femmes? It’s like saying Black Lives Matter is about black people and racists. It’s about saying that and calling it inclusive.
It never stops amazing me how willing and eager people are to treat women as an evil oppressor class.
Reductive much? Understanding that part of being a woman is feeling unsafe doesn’t mean that you actually live that experience.
My dad is 60. A couple years ago, he and his fiancee went to see a play in a town they weren’t familiar with. It was dark when they walked back to their car. A group of teenage boys standing on the sidewalk nearby started jeering and shouting comments at them; his fiancee was scared, so he opened her door for her before walking around the back. They were both really shaken by the whole thing afterward (and they’re not the kind of people who overreact or exaggerate, I totally believe their fear was justified).
My dad had been asking a lot of questions about feminism at the time, and when he told me about this incident, he said, “I don’t think I ever understood that experience of feeling physically powerless before. I used to have this attitude where I could fight them off, or run away, or at least get a few hits in. But if those kids wanted to hurt me, there’s nothing I could have done about it.”
So now, he understands the feeling of fear and helplessness that many women have in certain situations with men, but that doesn’t mean he understands the experience of being those women. Having that feeling of power and losing it seems like a hugely different experience to me than growing up knowing you don’t have it. There are shared components to the experiences, but it would be ridiculous to say that my dad knows what it’s like to be a woman, or that I know what it’s like to be an aging man.
” Lots of people like to consider themselves radical without actually being able to make any space for people coming from a different place.” — Yeah, that’s not what “radical” means. Radical doesn’t mean wild and aimless.
I still don’t get what the difference between being a woman and being femme is meant to be. Does being femme mean something like conforming to traditional notions of femininity?
Hang on, I think I get it now. As per my comment on the post previous about this, as a gender critical woman who conforms to norms of gendered appearance, I can just redefine myself as an agender or nonbinary femme. This means I don’t have to be concerned about how my personal practices regarding my presentation (hair, make up, clothes which emphasise my body shape, heels, etc) reinforce the asymmetrical gender binary. Instead of being self critical, I can claim that criticism of my conformance to gender norms is ITSELF a form of oppression. So criticising the performance of gender becomes oppressive rather than gender itself. I guess this would even extend beyond norms of appearance / presentation to other practices: being a stay at home mum, being nurturing, being self-effacing.
That is just perverse.
Emily #4, I had just popped in here to say something along those lines. I think the sudden emphasis on “femmes” has come about at least partly so that women who profess themselves “nonbinary” will still be allowed into the woman club. (Whatever the “woman club” even means, in their circles.)
Yes, but it also means that instead of being critical of gender reinforcing practices, they can claim them as some deeply felt, marginalised identity, and therefore off-limits from critique.
I already knew that much, having been attacked for being “femme phobic” by some of the woke women (Stephanie Zvan in particular).
I guess the lack of capacity to be self-critical about gendered practices shows just how deeply gender is internalised. People struggle to divorce their self-conceptions from their gender, so they theorise that it must come from within. Ironic how all this emphasis on self-knowledge in identity politics ends up precluding any kind of genuinely deep reflection on self. It’s a very superficial kind of self-knowledge.
You know, I can’t even engage critically with their argument because I still have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about when they use the word “femme”. For communication to take place there must be a agreed on set of symbols understood by both sides. Femme appears to mean everything and nothing.
I’m actually inclined to give them that point, that the ‘femme identity’ is invisible. Hell, it is not just invisible, but also intangible and in fact completely ineffable, as demonstrated by that vapid discussion of what ‘femme’ means a little earlier in the article. It can mean anything, depending only on the whim of each individual, and all meanings are accepted as valid in a “it’s true for me” sort of way… but you must accept the concept in some fashion, or else you are a TERF.
It is a new theology. It is vague enough that it can’t be pinned to any particular definition, yet disbelief puts you in despised company. Any attempt to pin down any detail is akin to arguing about the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin.
*****
#4
Pretty much. The new approach is not to criticise the concept of having behaviours compartmentalised and linked to anatomy, but rather to invent new compartments, with new names and ‘sophisticated theologies’ to explain the inexplicable and ineffable.
They’ve de-linked behaviour from anatomy at least, but a bespoke strait-jacket is still a strait-jacket.
This bottomless self-centeredness reminds me of Trump. There is a widespread erosion of critical thinking that really exists outside of specific ideology.