Femme

Femme (alternatively spelled “fem”) is a queer resistive embodied identity liberated from the limits of normative gender (Story 2016). Femme approaches femininity, encompasses it, and then pushes against its boundaries—especially those informed by Eurocentric ideals of “woman.” Femme demands repositioning gender as a fluid and creative process of being. When language seeks to confine or define our sexualities and genders, femme marks itself as an ineffable performative gender. In what follows, I trace the historical usage of the term femme in US LGBT culture, centering a femme framework that is “bent, unfixed, unhinged, and finally unhyphenated” (Rose 2002, 12). I explore femme across three movements in an effort to describe its “unruliness that struts across time and place” (S. Lewis 2012, 106): the homophile movement of the 1940s to the 1950s, the gay liberation movement of the 1960s to the 1970s, and queer organizing of the 1980s and 1990s. I ask the reader to understand not only the shifting uses of a gendered term but also how reading the past through the language of the present can provide a deep understanding of human experience across time (Snorton 2017; Stryker 2008). Alternatively, the term movement asks us to consider the ways that gender is embodied—its rhythms appear in gesture, form, aesthetic, and lived experience. Taken together, femme is movement work characterized by possibility.