Gravity: Iterations

I think Nora was taken aback by how much pain. We watched a bike with one white rim and speculated about the owner. I had a throat full of steelies that I would forget about for a few minutes. But you can’t get very far into any sort of dialog without being affected by a mouthful of heavy, marbles– so close to slipping without warning. Our conversation would hit some secret hold– some gentle, felt, indentation to a drain and I had to violently tip my words away from it because I knew they would fall in. Do I swallow them hard? Do I spit them– indecorously on the table and cry out? I am no longer curious about what’s inside. They are silver, heavy, carcinogenic, reflective, dense, slippery, and wet. I inhale hard and think it would feel better to suffocate on them. After a while my neck got sore from twitching it upwards and away as if to incline the field and loose the marbles from their ill-fated orbit.

Elsew/here: I don’t know how you’re feeling. I think you are dyadic, precarious, longing. On Sunday I thought that you’d simply come out of it. That this was some wild, ridiculous moment that you could escape from. We would pass through it and work on it later. I misunderstood. I think I know better. You are Halfway absorbed with some other thing (work) and then fall, sometimes, to thoughts of me but not like I do. You are not sucked and dropped– but instead flip yourself over as if you’ve finished the page and are now interested in attending to the next one. I live in a pothole universe. For you– something linear. It isn’t (like me) that your stomach drops out and you have to tip the tray. You go into it on purpose, stepping into me and then immediately you claw and panic for air. I wish I didn’t make you feel dropped in a well. We’re both drowning of different things. You feel compelled to finish the book, to check sources, to array the translations and read all the criticism available. Then you want to produce something original and incisive. At the same time, you would be relieved if you could close the text and hurl it hard enough that it wouldn’t come back.

This, suffused with dire sadness, is about as appropriate as I can get. PythagoraSwitch! Indeed.

You’re right. Suffering is so 2007.

Knight and Tell

(hey, you guys, with the HUGE questions relegated to parenthetical comments!)

In a comment on my post “The Butch-Femme (public) Embarrassment, past and present” d asked:

The reductive part of my query is: what makes a femme if it’s not the performance (I mean that in the linguistic and not the theatrical sense) of a set of culturally intelligible feminine behaviors/appearances/responses/demeanors?*

And so I’ll answer it, now. But I want to be clear that I understand and value a broad range of queer identity, expression, and relationships. I am not anti-butch/butch or femme/femme. Nor am I AT ALL advocating against alternative identifications. I’ll repeat what I wrote earlier: people should self-categorize (or not). What I am writing about is my self-categorization as femme within a butch/femme model.

Femme is not just a performance of culturally intelligible feminine behaviors in the World. To me, at least, it is also:

1. A performance within broader queer social contexts and within butch/femme communities. (Even when a femme isn’t actively in a butch/femme context she still has butch/femme in mind in orienting her performance in the world)

2. A certain kind of active and sincere love and camaraderie between butches and femmes. And a history of that love (if not for the individual, at least within queer history) which assures both butch and femme that they can be recognized, desired, and loved without compromising. I think it is important to recognize that butch and femme are not purely performance. I have rarely met a butch or femme who has had the safety and wealth required to perform gender solely as a radical political act. The butches and femmes I know (those I recognize as my family and my people) have always been Queer in the most strictly denotative sense of the word– and have regularly been endangered and hurt because of that Queerness. But acting differently isn’t an option. Among the other things it does for butches, butch/femme may create a space where the butch body can be ideally imagined. A femme respects the butch’s radical misplacement in the world- her enclosure in a body that imperfectly (and traumatically) represents her. Butch/femme becomes a place where the butch body is perfectly at home.

If and when butches and femmes first encounter gay communities they often feel alienated by them. In part because butch/femme has a history of embarrassing lesbian communities and in part because gay communities often organize in order to achieve seemingly superfluous things. Why do we care about a mixer or advocating for gays in the military if our queer lives have always about surviving our queerness? Why would we advocate for gay marriage when we are still being denied entrance to unions, denied access to proper healthy care, and spending so much time hungry and homeless, without family. These are all basic elements of survival and shouldn’t require heterosexist legitimation through marriage to access (for queers or anyone). So butch/femme becomes a double retreat.

3. A specific way of navigating the problem of unsolicited sexual desire for the femme through both the solicitation of desire and the refusal of desire. A commitment to a navigation intelligible differently to the world-at-large and within a butch/femme context. Butch and femme bodies are both public property in different ways. For femmes, as for all women, there is first the fact of having a sexualized body. There is the additional problem that since men know you are gay they 1) believe they understand and can “see” your sex acts 2) believe your sex exists purely for their consumption 3) want to prove that you’re actually straight (and, charmingly, expect that they are the first man who’s tried to teach you the ways of the world.) I lived with these day traders in NY with NC and one of the first questions one of them asked me when I told them I was gay was “does that mean you’re a virgin?” These are problems for all dyke-identified women, of course. It gets more complicated for femmes because we perform femininity and solicit desire. After all, one of the most toxic aspects of gender hierarchies is the way that women’s sex becomes the culprit for men’s desire. Because it is one of the most toxic aspects this blame desperately requires a femme’s performance, constant critique, and perpetual ambivalence (if she is to survive the world).

I think the problem gets even more complex when you start to consider what kind of obligations and challenges might be added by involving oneself in sex work. And historically many femmes have been involved in sex work. When the femme’s body is ACTUALLY being consumed for money men begin to believe she owes it to anyone who can pay. And when being desirable and delivering pays the bills, what happens to other desire? All of the sex worker’s acts are called into question– particularly her sincerity and her desire for her partner. The invited-desirer (here I mean the (potential) lover as opposed to the voyeur, the john, men, the public) can feel guilty about her own lust for the femme. Sex work, of course, also complicates the veritable mine-ridden landscape of sex, pleasure, fear, memory, and pain that already exists for the femme and the butch.

For the butch, butch/femme can be a place where historical community makes a butch’s bodily homelessness, her stoneness, more immediately legible– for the femme it might provide a space to meet people versed and willing to work with the political and emotional realities of sex work.

4. A coming together of all of these elements whereby the existing butch/femme frameworks are both challenged, fulfilled, and challenging and fulfilling to the femme. That is, whether the soothing comes from a butch, a femme, or herself, a femme finds/makes a livable space for herself in butch/femme. The femme structures/defines personal soothing within the context of butch/femme and then goes to butch/femme to find/make a recognizable haven where she is read and understood.

I realize that I haven’t even begun to answer the question you’ve asked. And, because I write specifically about desire in almost every facet of my work, I’ll try to address that part of the question in the future. But for now I hope this clears some things up.

*Please do read the comment in full! I even linked you, for godsake.

Your Questions Answered for Less

I am planning to write a series of posts about butch/femme and maybe I should have started with one about my own identification as femme or sex as a femme or whatever. But I didn’t. I started with something that required me to go back and define my own identifications as I progressed. Footnoting got annoying and so I left big things for another time. I’ll answer your questions but also write more later.

I hope it’s alright that I’m reposting these here…. Should the author oppose to the repost or the linking, I trust she’ll let me know.

If femme identity is only constructed during sex with butches, will your memoir be a sort of academic pornography? Also, does that mean we are only a certain percentage queer femme, determined by length of time engaged in butch/ femme relations divided by sexual lifespan?

I’ll start with the second part. I don’t think that femme identity is only constructed through butch/femme relationships or through sex with butches. I’m a queer femme (involved in some butch/femme model) in public, in private, at school, at work, even when I’m not with a butch at the time. I construct it when I get dressed, put on my makeup, carry my body, interact with women, interact with men, perform, fuck, speak, and write.

However, I don’t think that I am actively performing my femme-ness (eesh) when I’m sleeping with other femme-women. Some butches and femmes would oust me from femme for ever sleeping with non-butch people. My identity doesn’t get suspended, I just perform it differently.

As for the first part. I really hope my memoir will be pure pornography. Doesn’t that sound much better? I certainly think so. Ideally it will only be academic because I’m receiving credit for it.

Isn’t the very idea of a ‘femme memoir’ dependent upon a revisionist critique of your sexual identity?

Definitely. I’m not sure that memoir can ever been anything besides a revisionist critique. Even if I were to, say, publish diary entries or photographs or something– they would still be phrased through the present. There is an imperative to retroject femme identity to birth, isn’t there? (The way dykes walk around talking about how their parents knew they were gay at 5. Which, honestly, is just as fucked up as when the parents draw those kind of conclusions.) I’m confident about being a realized femme though. I believe you can become a femme and it’s not just a matter of- say- recognizing you always were one. I am certainly not planning to write a memoir about “how I came to identify as femme” and go along explaining everything as if it were a step toward a forgone conclusion. I am calling it a femme memoir because either I will be focusing on how/when/why I have identified as femme and interacted with the world.

…
p.s. If you haven’t already, don’t google “erotic memoir.” It will only make you unhappy.

Wow. Well, at least the bar’s set low?

The Butch-Femme (public) Embarrassment, past and present

I started a reading project to get me going with this femme memoir. I’m taking the temperature of the butch-femme/femme lit field so I know where to go with my own creative nonfiction project. Perhaps you’ll have feedback.*

Before I start, I want to be clear that I am talking about butch/femme and butch and femme (right now, in this context) in reference to people who identify as butches and femmes invested and active in a relationship with butch/femme. I am absolutely not talking about femme-looking women or butch-looking dykes who do not identify as such but are unceremoniously grouped with them by the uncomfortable, the condensers, the anyone who will. I, I promise, will not.

Yesterday, I read Joan Nestle’s A Restricted Country and in her chapter, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950’s,” she considered a compelling argument about why butch/femme is so publicly reviled. (Yes, I said reviled. Contemporary rhetoric might have you believe that butch/femme is the norm and that alternate identities/relationships are rare and so endangered by butch/femme overrun homogenization. But that argument comes from fear and eh-hem *hegemony* and not reality) Joan, writing in the 80’s, explains how butch/femme relationships embarrass lesbian communities (1950’s-80’s, with a nod to longer ago) but I’d like to reconsider her work as it pertains to younger, emergent queer communities and the dynamics within them.

Nestle says that butch/femme couples make sex unavoidably visible to the public, producing a shameful subculture that non-butch/femme-identified lesbians cannot (but are forced to) explain to their empathetic straight-friends. Butch/femme sex is obvious to the public because 1) the phallus is obvious 2) butches are, in part, butch because of their deft sexual expertise– something onlookers might experience as skill developed from doing sex to/practicing on(?) femmes 3) straight men and women and lesbian women identify the femme with a heterosexual, bottoming woman, and can envision her sexuality, giving it imaginative life.

Of course otherwise-identified lesbian women are sexual, too. I don’t mean to say here that butch/femme is an inherently more sexual relationship than others. Rather, their relationship, whether actually sexual or not, reads always as sexual. I am also not arguing that femmes are inexpertly sexual (HA!) or bottoms. But butch/femme sexuality is readily intelligible to the public in these ways.

Nestle has this sort of brilliant point when she re-evaluates the moment at which an onlooking man demands of a lesbian couple, “Who’s the man?” This question, Nestle explains, reveals more about the limitation of heterosexual sex and the anxiety surrounding that limitation. The man’s shout embarrasses his girlfriend and reveals his own lack of expertise instead of condemning perversion. I’m not going to talk about queer heterosexual people right now so let me continue before it comes to that.

Given the state of butch-femme (butch/femme-unfriendly “radical queers” needle us, dyke friends excuse my history of dating butches as a coincidence or fetish, I get more queer-ok points for having also slept with non-butches…**) I would like to extend and adapt Nestle’s argument into the present. A new sex of queers are ashamed: the ones who believe that the perfect, queer, gender-expression is an androgynous genderqueer one, and believe that the perfect queer desire is unfettered by appearance. They believe that the most hetero-patriarchy-smashing queerness is the sex-filled kind in which everyone sleeps with everyone else.

This produces a femme/butch-femme-hostile environment because it begs butches and femmes to queer themselves so they are visible as queer and radical to a dominating, young group. It also embarrasses genderqueers by upsetting their perfect model of desire. If the perfect queerness requires unbounded desire of every-body, then the perfect queer is politically mandated to want every other homo to wear the body that the desirer desires. While femmes still “look like femmes,” they might not be sexually attractive to andro-queers–making the requirement to fuck them more difficult.***

Ultimately, the embarrassing problem of butch/femme is still about the visibility of their sex. The perfect contemporary radical queer not only desires everyone and is desired by everyone in return but also produces and experiences boundless, perverse, desire. We could provisionally identify him as a kinky switch. But this kind of sex is not actually fulfilling to everyone (or anyone) and so the necessity for all-encompassing sex increases. If everyone is doing everything then everyone will be fulfilled, accidentally, at some point or another. Of course, this is not how sex, queer or what have you, actually operates. People do avow tastes and desires and then, we hope, practice them. I refer to these iconic, imaginary, ideal, figures because their presence in a young queer public consciousness determines the way queers treat each other.

Butch/femme relationships do not publicly share this genderqueer model of sexual desire. They embrace something specific, perverse, and extremely variable. But, to others, the sex might look circumscribed, limited (in the way it used to look old-fashioned and hegemonic.) So to the straight world we still look like sexual perverts (which is dangerous but, I think, worth it.) And to the queer world we look like a relic or just like a bunch of repressed lesbians (which hurts.)

*Some of you are butches and femmes. Some of you are my sister or Ladywife. For the rest of you– I’m not sure what we’re starting from so I’ll try to be clear.

** Because femme is a construct, I believe it cannot exist when I am not constructing it. Since my femme-identity is not constructed during sex with non-butches, I wouldn’t explain myself as a femme when I am sleeping with femme-looking women or non-butch identified dykes.

***The fact that they might not desire the andro-queers is not the pertinent question because so many people accept the pervasive andro-queer project as queer ideal. (Thanks Judith Halberstam!!)