Not a Pretty Girl: My Fem(me)inist Manifesto

Although I created this blog to talk about geeky topics, I’m slowly coming to realize that my geekiness and my feminism are pretty closely linked, and I find myself geeking out about feminist stuff as much as I lend my social analysis to aspects of geek culture. So I will attempt to find a kind of balance between the two, but still maintain my desire to think critically (or “academically”) about topics I post about. I have a few future posts milling in the back of my mind, namely one on the construction of geeks/nerds in the media (including portrayals of geeks in video games, which I find intriguing). Anyhow.

This manifesto was originally written/inspired by a women’s studies class I took in my second year. The course was largely instrumental in shaping my gender identity today. I grew up in a household where body image and spending time/energy/money on appearance were not highly valued. Prior to taking this course I often felt like I was betraying my feminist self when I dressed up, or put on make up, even though it was something I secretly enjoyed. I think this comes from stereotypes of feminists that are portrayed in the media – hairy legged, beauty-shunning butch women. Even though I had been identifying as a feminist since my early teens, and studying women’s rights since high school, I had never read feminist work that wasn’t critical of all things traditionally feminine. Even though feminism is largely about choice, I couldn’t quite articulate that I wasn’t blindly accepting things about myself that were “normal” – I was making an active choice.

There were two texts from this course that were instrumental in changing the way I felt and talked about being a woman, and that helped me identify as both “femme” and “sex positive.” The first was a collection of essays titled Brazen Femme (Brushwood Rose, C. & Camilleri A. (Ed.), Brazen Femme (pp. 11-14). Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.), and the second a single essay called “Straight with a Twist” ( Thomas, C. (2000). Straight with a Twist. In “Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality” (pp. 11-44). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc.)

The construction of gender and sexual identity offered in both “Straight with a Twist” and Brazen Femme is framed as a way in which everyday personal practice is a political.  They both inhabit “queer” spaces; not necessarily queer defined as gayness, but “despecified queerness” defined as principles of opposition to hegemonic normality.  Although I would never have identified as “queer” or even “femme” before reading Brazen Femme, I found myself identifying with the self-description of femme women.  Initially, my “straight guilt” made me feel uncomfortable. What business did I, a heterosexual female, have to be reading a queer book and wanting so badly to claim myself a femme?  I remember feeling such relief when I discovered in class that I was hardly the only one, nor was I usurping my privilege by feeling that way.

I think I found in Brazen Femme the same “at last!” that Thomas describes in his article.  It was a moment of ‘aha’ in which my own sense of not quite fitting in to the neat categories of “straight” and “feminine” (or the overlap between the two) was recognized and named in the words of another.  For so long I had struggled to define myself outside of “normal,” describing myself as ‘just me,’ because if there was no neat category to fit into I was a going to be a category all by myself.  I claimed my sexual identity as ‘straight by not narrow’ in the same way that Thomas says “straight with a twist,” struggling to find a way to explain that while I straight-identify, it is a deliberate choice, not one of blind heteronormativity.  But in that ‘aha’ moment there as internal paradox– why, after so long fighting against categorization, do I find such pleasure in claiming the label of femme as my own?

The meaning behind the subtitle, “queering femininity,” is explained in the introduction to Brazen Femme.  Their desire was to collect works that described femme without confining it to “one tidy package.”  This goes back to finding an answer to the question of the internal irony in finding comfort in self-identifying as femme.  This is the very intention of femmeininity in the first place.  Inhabiting the space of femme is the multiple, if not limitless, forms of identity that Thomas describes as the deliberate ambiguation of identity categories.  This is the beauty of the label, and I think part of the reason I feel comfortable with claiming it as my own.  As illustrated throughout Brazen Femme, there is no stereotypical “type” of femme, no one way to inhabit the label that is “more femme” than the others.  It is a queer femininity, a simultaneous acknowledgment and celebration of what sets you apart from other people and a demand not to be defined monolithically. A deliberate step into what Judith Butler would call “working the weakness” in the category of femininity by deliberately working against the idealizations that are presented by hegemonic discourses about what “real” femininity looks like.
Femme offers me a chance to embrace some of the contradictions within myself as acceptable rather than signs of an inability to commit to “resistance to regimes of the normal.”  I recognized in the stories in Brazen Femme the practices I’ve been engaging in for years.  The deliberate construction/articulation of my appearance and my gender identity as a political act, a performance, an “essential irony” and a way to cause “trouble” ala the work of Butler.  I crave an identity “in flux and in motion, … constantly being reinvented,” mapping onto my body the persona of “goth” one day and dressing all in white the next, enjoying the feeling of unconformity to any one social niche, enjoying the confusion of those around my as I watch with my double gaze as people struggle to categorize me.  Reveling in the fact that what you see is not what you get but at the same time recognizing that appearance is fluid and doesn’t even begin to describe the internal complications of being femme, nor does fluidity of expression necessarily equate to “fakeness” or inconsistency. I think Elizabeth Ruth cleverly explains this in her piece “Quantum Femme” by saying “[s]he’s been many people in many places but somehow always the same.”

The space where my fem(me)ininity and my feminism cross is often complicated.  It took a long time and a lot of internal conflict for me to accept that my feminism and my submissive tendencies could inhabit the same identity without reconciling one to the other.  It also took a lot of strength as a feminist to “come out” as a submissive.  I think that strength came from my femme identity, from my understanding that contradictions and difference aren’t necessarily wrong, and from years of practice at not culling the urge to do something that I enjoy simply because it doesn’t fall under the regimes of “normal” or “acceptable.”  Perhaps this comes from my own preference for “queer masculinities” (or at least, men who resist hegemonic masculinity as much as I resist hegemonic femininity) but the viewpoint presented by feminism that to lie beneath a man and enjoy it was to subjectify myself in some way to being unequal and oppressed seem to me inherently problematic.  Being on top didn’t seem to prove anything at all and brief escapades in doing it sideways caused me to further question ways in which “feminist” and “sex” could intersect while still remaining a pleasurable activity.  In my relationships I have never (and will never) settle for being treated as any less capable than I am, regardless of who is on top during sex, and in that I think I can claim fem(me)ininity.

I have had this conversation with other feminists, trying to explain to them that as a straight woman I can engage in sex, even bondage, without that equating to being an oppressed subject position.  They expressed feelings of fear of heterosexual sex, hatred of the inequality they saw inherent in the act of penetration, and that saddens me.  To be fair and honest, although I am not a stranger to gendered sexual violence, I have been very privileged to have incredibly open, understanding and caring lovers, and in that sense my ability to comprehend fear of masculinity is diminished, and I recognize that.  Still, to me those sentiments, feeling disempowered by how your gender plays out in your relationships and as though your gender and sexuality are a trap without any escape, are the antithesis of femme sexuality.  To me those statements inhabit a paradigm I cannot fathom.  I have never seen boys as a threat, although beating them at what they were best at (whether that be violent video games, running fast or monkey bars [while wearing a dress]) and fighting back when they tried to push me around was often a source of personal pride in my gender.  I think the way those women spoke about their experience with their gender and sexualities articulate for me the work that I see still remaining for feminism in order for gender equality to permeate beyond the level of a social movement action and into the level of individual effects.

The space where being femme (as a gender performance) and feminism (as a political practice) intersect feel more comfortable for me after reading Brazen Femme.  The act of dressing up and thus “buying into” society’s idea of beautiful always seemed to me to conflict with the ideals of feminism.  It has been noted that in the lesbian community there is not a lot of space for ‘girls’ to be sexy and I think this spills over into the feminist movement as a whole.

To me, being femme means being identifying with Ani DiFranco when she sings “I am not a pretty girl, that is not what I do…” because being beautiful isn’t something done for the pleasure of others (male or otherwise) and recognizing that while makeup is fun and tall shoes are sexy, they’re all nothing more than a pretty lie.  Dressing in typically “feminine” ways does not equate to being “feminized” in a negative way. I would argue that femme is a necessary building block on the road to constructing gender equality; without models for ways to inhabit femininity that don’t equate to marginalization there is no hope for a rearticulation and inhibition of the hegemonic dominance of femininity.
The issue of accepting your right to pleasure as a given, as a right of being a femme, is a major part of my femme identity.  Both Thomas and Brazen Femme advocated loving queerly, whether that relationship be heterosexual or homosexual or otherwise, not accepting heteronormativity even in heterosexual relationships.  Thomas argues that heteronormativity is inherently “anti-sexual” because the point of heterosexual relationships is reproduction, and suggests that in this sense anyone who enjoys sex for the sake of sex is “queering” their sexuality– a statement I find more powerful as I grow older in both age and my relationship and am starting to have to reiterate my choice not to have children more and more frequently.

In this sense fem(me) is a queer identity in that it embraces sex positive ideals.  It’s difficult to reconcile the spaces where the feminine agency of sex intersects with heteronormativity.  Women who initiate or solicit sex and sexual attention are marked as “sluts” or any of the dozens of other words that describe errant female sexuality.  The line between slut, femme and whore is often blurry and (as the author Kathyrn Payne notes) “the social sanctions are damn near the same.” Even within my own relationships I can’t initiate sex too often without somewhat deprecating eye rolling at my “insatiability.”  The implications of this are interesting from an objective perspective– if I was the masculine subject position in my relationship my behaviour would never be questioned.  In the subtext of the comments, underneath the teasing about my rampant libido, I am ever conscious of not trying to imply that my partner’s masculinity is unable to fulfill my expectations.  Rather, I am coming to realize that the masculine “ideal” of rampant sexuality is as highly constructed as the fact that, as a woman, I am not supposed to enjoy or initiate sex.  The restrictions of rigid gender identities clearly has implications not just for femmes, but also for their partners.

The day I was femme in public for the first time since I “came out” was pretty fantastic.  Stomping through puddles in my Big Black Boots with my rainbow knee socks, my short skirt and a suggestive slogan on my tshirt, I sang in my head to myself as I walked “I am a woman, but that is not all…” and I have never felt more empowered as a girl than I did in that moment.  It didn’t matter who was looking (at the hairy legs poking out between where the socks ended and my skirt began) or who judged me because of how I looked (slut/freak/queer/whore) because in that moment I was femme, and enjoying the multiple categories and inconstancies inherent in that moment.

Since that time I have inhabited my femme-ness much more comfortably, although in some ways the lack of tension has created a problematic relaxed attitude to de-construction of femininity and as a result I have become less femme and more stereotypically feminine. I’m wearing makeup regularly and donning a skirt more often than not. Partly, this is a reaction to the joining the fairly mainstream workforce. My job is pretty boundary challenging enough that when I’m not trying to dress to impress teh people with teh power, I’m trying to blend in – not cause trouble.  A lot has changed in that time in my personal life, too – I have moved in with my boyfriend, and I am still trying to reconcile feminism and my desire for marriage (but that’s a whole other essay!). As we both move up and on in our careers, I feel myself becoming more privileged, and moving closer to the “centre” in a way that is painful for the part of me that wants to live life with a femme-like philosophy of challenging and questioning every choice.

Part of the reason I wanted to post this essay was to re-visit my statement of my femme identity and reconnect my sense of self to that time. I need to remember that how I dress in the morning and having the choice to wear make up (or not) is part of a daily political practice. I may be girlier than ever, and reveling in it, but that doesn’t change the vision of femininity that I am fighting for. I’m still a brazen femme!