Fetch: Beyond Butch and Femme

“Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s never going to happen!”

They don’t really have a proper name for what I am. Labels are good, labels are fun, but sometimes they leave the less extreme without a name. In our lesbian subculture, it’s the old standbys of butch and femme. We both hate them and love them, hate how they cage us into strict dichotomies and expectations, love them for the identity that they can provide. We all talk about how we should avoid labeling ourselves – it’s a symptom of heteronomativity and the threat that the queer community places on their way of engaging in romantic and sexual activity, and it’s a product of the heteronormative way of categorizing homosexuality, therefore owning it and rendering it a mildly pathological and amusing whim.

The truth is, there’s really nothing wrong with butch and femme as labels within our own subculture. The butch explores aspects of masculinity while still embracing herself as a woman – she gets the best of both worlds, endeavoring to embrace masculinity and remove it from its usual male counterpart. She is often the most visible of lesbians, and the most threatening. People are uncomfortable when they cannot immediately distinguish gender, and they don’t like their well-established lines crossed. They certainly don’t want women taking masculine roles – they think women are just trying to be men, their minds too shallow and boundaries too limited to understand how socialized they are in believing that masculinity and femininity are stable constructs. They think that these women want what men have, not realizing that they do have what men have, and more, and they are perfectly happy with that, thank you. The butch enjoys the freedom of expressing her masculine side – which so many women are restrained from doing – and gender-bending established expectations, thus forcing the society around her to spend at least three seconds questioning their own assumptions. The butch, because she is most visible, makes the lesbian community a reality to those who would rather turn their heads.

The femme or lipstick lesbian seems to have her homosexuality questioned more often because, “But dear, you look so straight.” They often don’t show up on the gaydar because they embrace their femininity until they blend in with what society expects of women. Also, when they reveal their sexuality to a flirting male, they have the indignity of dealing with a request to watch them in action. Girl-on-girl pornography made for men most often consists of either straight girls, bisexual girls, or lipstick lesbians, all doing it for that great monetary equalizer, and it’s easy to dismiss femmes as either bicurious, looking for male attention, or just confused. Give them a night of hetero-sex, and they’ll switch just like that. Like the butch, the femme pushes social standards past their limit, and while the butch’s challenge is more visual, the femme’s push is more verbal when she comes out as the femme lesbian – she looks every inch like a girl, yet she likes pussy just as much as the butch. She does not want or need a man to balance her femininity. Also like the butch, the femme is a cookie cutter option for lesbians, limiting and highly sexualized and stereotyped. These labels, however, in their more natural contexts, are perfectly acceptable, and I always encourage the exploration of one’s sexuality within these labels if the compulsion is strong enough. They provide an identity – the leather and lipstick offer a solid sense of belonging within a category, which lets you know who you are and what’s expected of you.

I, on the other hand, have trouble putting myself in one of these labels. I fit into neither the butch nor the femme expectation. I express instead a more fetch approach – somewhere between butch and femme – the new label for all of those lesbians unable to find a name for themselves. We like categorization in this day and age of scientific definitions when every little problem becomes a disorder and grocery stores have six million different kinds of peanut butter. We’ve liked categorizing and labeling for as long as we’ve had language – it’s what language is – so it’s only fair, I think, that the fetches have a name for themselves so that they can answer that fabled introductory question of what their identity preference is.

I’ve had trichotillomania (a compulsive hair-pulling disorder comparable to OCD) for about three years, and I’ve shaved my hair completely off several times now. Part of the reason was simply to get rid of the temptation and to help my thin and bald spots grow back in, full, thick, and healthy. But the other part was to find self-confidence in my own femininity after suffering several years of self-deprecatory depression, to demonstrate that one did not have to have long hair in order to be a girl. I expected some foibles of gender identification – it would have been folly to expect anything less, especially as I let my hair grow back two months later until it looked like a boyish buzz cut. However, while my bald head allowed me to wear colorful bandanas and earned me several compliments, growing out my hair seemed to appeal to my more masculine characteristics. I continue to find it ironic that I get more ‘sirs’ with hair than without. I cannot deny that it bothers me when people get confused – after all, I was trying to make bald more feminine, not myself more masculine. But at the same time, if it can challenge gender assumptions, it’s just a hit for the team.

I don’t want to be confused for being male or frilly femme (mostly because the latter would just look ridiculous on me). I have wanted to push the limits of femininity by claiming aspects of the masculine for females without falling in that direction. I enjoy feminine things. Girls have a much larger selection of clothes that I much prefer to men’s clothing. I like to cook and crochet. I like to put on nail polish. I like purple and green and am developing a new respect for a rich, dark pink. I enjoy the arts and literature – pastimes assumed to be feminine in this era, although it hasn’t always been. I actually enjoy a good bit of domestic manual labor, like gardening and house-cleaning. I make and wear jewelry, and I love crystals and gems. So a lot of me is comprised of the feminine into which I was born and raised. But I also enjoy claiming the masculine for my own – maintaining a bald head is only one example of that. I also love horror movies and novels, and horror manages to creep into whatever I write. I’m sexually dominant, I steal unisex shirts from my younger but taller brother’s drawer if I know he does not wear them anymore, I enjoy playing soccer and watching basketball, and I have something of a butch body (although I’m not exactly happy about that). I identify as a girl but feel like neither male nor female. I don’t know what it means to feel like a particular sex. I just feel like a person, comfortable with putting my toe in both pools of gender while identifying as one sex. I do not want to be confined into the butch role that I seem to have placed myself in lately. The thought of being butch when what I would really love to be is the unassuming fetch only fills me with fear, just as fear fills me when I think of wearing make-up, stockings, and doing my hair every day. And the truth is, this isn’t just a lesbian issue. I can think of plenty of girls and women who take the middle path of gender expression.

I want a form and identity in which I can indulge in my brother’s shirts sometimes as well as my women’s jeans and shoes, in short hair and long hair, pearls with punk, butch with femme. As yet unlabeled fetches, unite!