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I happened to have short hair that year, thanks to a tragic ’80s bowl cut and thus, I had to wear pants and a button-up shirt and tie. It reminded me of when I was a child in a clog dancing class (I grew up rural), and because no boys wanted to clog dance, half the group had to dress up in boy’s clothes to do the partner dancing. But as soon as I left the house where we’d been fixing each other’s binders and facial hair, I felt the least sexy I’d ever felt in my life. I was dating a trans man at the time, and we thought that my dressing as Ponyboy might be sexy. Most of the femmes dressed up in drag, and one butch dressed up as Cherry, the only girl character who appears prominently in the book. I didn’t fully understand how embodied my femme identity was until my mid-20s, a year or two before I got the tattoo, when a group of friends and I dressed up for Halloween as the Outsiders.
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What does it mean to feel like a word belongs to you, or your community? I know what it is by knowing what it isn’t. It is like the word queer, a somewhat open-ended word that nonetheless feels specific and true. Their appropriation of the word gives me the same feeling I had working the door: Is the word safer for them than just using the adjective feminine, with all its misogynistic connotations?īut what began as a word that just “felt right” given my love for fishnet stockings, the poetry of Minnie Bruce Pratt, and butches is now a word that means more things to more people with every passing year.
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“But we’re so safe here!” they said, even as they groped gay men and threw up on the dance floor, appearing to care only about themselves. I was reminded of when I worked the door at a gay bar in my 20s and so many straight women brought their bachelorette parties to the dance floor that we had to start kicking them out. You can’t have EVERYTHING,” I muttered as I grabbed a handful of shirts and hid them beneath a stack of tacky dresses. In one of those halcyon pre-pandemic shopping days where one could lounge about a mall store caressing plastic purses and age-inappropriate fast fashion, my friend and I found shirts at H&M emblazoned with the word femme in all caps. Is my attachment to the words queer, femme, and dyke about my age, aging, nervousness about irrelev It can often feel like straight women are trying to queer their lives a little, stopping short of actually, you know, having queer sex or relationships. I see it used often on social media as a replacement for the word feminine, specifically when talking about fashion and feminism, and often used when defending themselves against accusations of frivolity or heterosexual banality, a concise, linguistic equivalent of I’m not like all the other girls. Recently, journalist Talia Lavin used it in her funny essay “ Blob Girl Summer” interchangeably with the word woman.
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(In the aughts, this would manifest in every femme wearing pleather skirts, leopard everything, lingerie as outwear, the reddest lips.) In 2015, Zooey Deschanel used it in Cosmowhen describing why she can be both girly and a feminist. There’s something that’s tougher, brighter, louder to it. You don’t have to identify as a woman to be a femme. If I had to define it, I’d say a femme is someone who presents in a feminine way and identifies on the LGBTQ spectrum. I rarely thought about the meaning of the word femme until I began to see it used incorrectly, specifically as a synonym for any straight or cis woman who embraces femininity.