CLPP 2010: Feminine-tastic

This workshop was focused on what it means to be feminine or female within a feminist movement.
Below are some excerpts from Jos and Bianca’s comments. It was a really great session and conversation afterwards. This panel was created to complement a panel on Masculinities that has been held for six years (and that I will be on this time around on Sunday).

Jos Truitt, Feministing

Speaking from the place of being a transgender woman, a queer woman and a white woman. Also from coming out as trans within the RJ movement. There are a lot of messy words and terms when it comes to talking about gender and gender identity.
These definitions are in flux because they are cultural terms.
Feminine. A collection of gender markers, external performance of gender. Women are accepted to conform to and men are not allowed to display. Hair, clothing, body shape and size, how we walk, eye contact, how we take up space in a room.
Femme. A deliberateness to it. Femme is a queer form of femininity and it’s about a deliberate performance of femininity. Performing femininity to a highlightened degree. It’s often connected to sexuality, but not necessarily.
Female. Who you are gender-wise. Nothing on the outside should have anything to do with who you are–even though there is a conflation. Having a female gender doesn’t necessarily mean you’re presenting in a feminine way and vice versa.
Feminism has done a really good job of critiquing a lot of the expectations of femininity and the way we are trained to perform feminine. Through the process of critiquing is we’ve moved from critiquing that girls have to play with barbie and like pink, we’ve started critiquing the desire, not just the societal expectation.
This has been a real struggle within feminism. It’s a movement that needs to build power, needs to build strength, and a movement that needs to win. These are all things associated with masculinity.
Our gender performance relates to how seriously people take us–femininity is not taken as seriously. Feminists are mocked and critiqued for displaying masculine traits, so you can’t do that either.
There is a privileging of masculinity within queer communities. You’ll see more respect given to butch people, more space given to those voices. When butchness is all that’s visible in our organizing communities, it’s a problem.
For people who were assigned male as birth, there are very limited gender performance options. If you’re presenting in a femme or feminine way you are a gay man. That’s the only option that exists.
For me, as a person who has never identified as a gay man, there was a constant misunderstanding of who I was and who I could be because of the limited understanding of how to be feminine.
Invisibility for femmes within queer communities. When you are performing a gender that is close to your identity it pushes you into a straight category. For male assigned people, performing femininity means you are hyper visible.
As a transgender woman there are certain things that I need to do for people to understand who I am. I do identify as femme, I like femme but a lot of what I do is to communicate my identity to other people.

Bianca Laureano, a self-identified fat queer disabled woman of color. She runs LatinoSexuality.com.

It’s hard to pick an issue or a topic or an event in my life. When I walked into a doctoral progam in women’s studies with a full face of make-up and high heels it became a big issue of contention. I’m happy to say that it’s changed a little bit and now we have more femmes in the program. That challenged me. Here I am identifying as a feminist and all these feminists were telling me that’s not the right way.
I now identify more as a radical woman of color. I’ve been hurt more by feminists than by anywhere else. My experience in that program really impacted that. My faculty was full of woman of color, but it was shocking to have them tell me not to wear heels.
They were also saying things to me because I was fat, and I shouldn’t wear high heels or short skirts. So that was really a challenge–they were trying to say you should cover you up, but we still want to pimp you out and put you on the brochure.
Aging within these communities is also a challenge, even if there are some privileges as we get older. The biggest part of my identity as a femme has being a disabled as a femme. I’m glad I was in my women’s studies program when I got diagnosed with my disability–I was glad I had the support of the other disabled feminists in that time.