How do you define your femme identity?
Gender has always felt to me like something essential and deep and hard to put your finger on. My femmeness is a core piece of my identity and has a lot to do with how I walk in the world, how I experience being female bodied, how I connect with my power, how I feel connected to queer history, how I express and create beauty, how I nurture and protect those I love, how I fight for what’s important to me, and generally do everything I do. In terms of the specific kind of femmeness I present, this is constantly evolving. Maybe I’m a fierce, rurally influenced, tough-ass, high intensity femme bombshell, just for starters.
How do other identities you have not only intersect with femme but also contradict it?
I think that contradictions when you’re talking about the politics of identity come from a narrow and enforced frame of reference. All of my identities intersect and I try hard to think outside of theconventional context so that there is no contradiction. I’m not always successful, and when I let dominant society (or queer culture, for that matter) dictate what is acceptable for me as a femme, and therefore what contradicts my gender, I feel discouraged and ashamed. Growing up rural and low-income, I tend to have a different skill set than people raised in urban or suburban areas. I grew up in a community where women built houses, chopped wood, made beer, raised and slaughtered animals, and whatever else they had to take care of business. This did not make them masculine. I remember an enlightening conversation I had with a femme friend of mine who was living on a farm with her newborn son, doing work trade for room and board. She told me about friends in the city giving her shit for the type of work she did around the farm, saying she was really butching it up. We talk about how incredibly stupid and infuriating this attitude is, especially from the context of our rural backgrounds. I’m a femme and it goes to follow that everything I do is femme, no matter what it is, because it’s being done by me.
Every piece of my identity is seen through the lens of each other piece, whatever angle you want to view things by.
What are some joys of being femme?
The joys I derive from being femme are really similar to the joys derived from any of my identities: forming community based on similar experience; having a context, a place, language to describe my experience; a history of people similar to me. All of this helps me to not feel so incredible alone and isolated in my individual experience of being alive and not fitting the mold in this time and place.
More specifically, I love embodying feminine energy and sexuality in a way that is specifically chosen and empowering and self motivated. This is a huge challenge and a huge ‘fuck you’ to misogynist culture and feels really good when I can pull it off.
Also, sharing intimate connections with other femmes (hos before bros!). My relationships with other femmes have seriously saved my life and continue to remind me everyday that I’m not a freakish alien, or if I am, I’m not alone in this.
I get a lot of joy from feeling acknowledged and appreciated for my deliberate gender in the world, which is a relatively new experience for me. I must say I’m enjoying it!
What role does writing play in community-building for you?
I plan on finding some really good ways to build community around writing, starting with the queer smut writers group I helped form recently. I will say that a big motivating factor in my writing has been to see some marginalized parts of my identity (being low-income, chubby, from a rural background, DIY, etc) get some representation in the genre of “lesbian erotica” in a way you don’t often see. My main hope is that this creates space for more and more folks who don’t feel represented, and maybe gives some queers with similar identities to me hot stories they can relate to.
How does it feel to be part of the Femmethologies?
I feel totally honored to be part of this project!
Femme is _____ (one word only, please)
strength.
