Femme means different things to different people. I love how femme of spectrum or femme presenting people change and break barriers that are typically reinforced through societal constraints. I am a femme-identified, queer, Black-Filipina and have been shamed by the media, my peers, and family members when rocking things from booty shorts and obscure accessories to my ladystache and my everyday makeup.
Countless femme folks and I are policed about our identities on a daily basis — in some cases, even by our own communities.But femmeness is more than what the white heterosexual gaze is. It is more than “a man in a dress,” “cake faces,” or acting like “a flaming fag.” It is more than shallowness and inferiority.
Radical femmes are continuously fighting against stereotypes and assumptions by wearing tight clothes to show off their stretch marks, using colourful kinky toys, sitting pretty in their wheelchairs, and using accessories as decorative forms of active resistance.
Thank you to all the hard femmes, high femmes, sick and disabled femmes, androgynous femmes, and femmes of colour.
To the fat femmes, queer femmes, aging femmes, trans femmes, sex worker femmes, tomboy femmes, cash poor femmes, and femmes who inter- sect one or more or all of these groups: Your acts of resistance are making space for variations on femme-identity and presentation, creating a nurturing home for new and blossoming femmes.
The Femme Chronicles is an ongoing mixed-media project archiving folks who wish to represent their own meaning of femme identity through portraiture, as featured in Strange Sisters: The Insatiable Redux at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
Fonna Seidu
Contributor
