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Femme gay

Queer Cultures 101

There are many ways to be a femme, so it’s leading not to confine oneself to a specific definitionbut below is an abstarct of how it was defined in the literature I read. Femme is a term used in LGBT society to describe someone who expresses themselves in a typically feminine way. With that said, femme differs from feminine, and the differences are key in understanding why the terminology femme is necessary. The shared threads amongst all femmes are their expression of femininity and their place on the Queer spectrum. Many individuals use it to embrace and redefine the stereotypes and expectations that are often placed on women.

Femme & Femininity

  • Many people outside the queer collective may not fully understand what femme means and how it differs from feminine, but the differences are why the terminology femme is necessary.
  • Femme describes a gender non-conforming person who presents and behaves in a traditionally feminine way with the inclusion of cisgender individuals who savor a more passive role in intimate relationships, asexual trans person women, or genderfluid individuals who spot as gay.
  • The common threads amongst all femmes are thei

    Why do straight-acting men have a problem with femme gays?

    The last few years have been central for “feminine” men. In the fashion world designers are increasingly blurring the lines of gender; many houses now opt out of gendered runway presentations, and Galliano recently presented a series of men with beehives and beaded gowns for his SS16 womenswear showing at Margiela. Over these same few years, RuPaul’s Drag Race has gone from a little-known reality show to a cultural behemoth, catapulting queenly well and truly into the mainstream. While these are only minor victories, it seems that the world at large is slowly adjusting to the notion that men don’t have to fit stereotypical perceptions of masculinity. 

    Ironically, this slight progression in acceptance seems to have triggered the LGBT community to shift in the opposite direction. Despite increasingly varied depictions of masculinity lgbtq+ men are still, by and large, rigidly defined by thin categories. Dating apps allow us to write concise profiles which list our height, weight, interests etc, all of which are optional, but gay dating apps often ask you to list whether you’re a top or bottom. In the context of meeting

    Out On The Couch

    By Briana Shewan, MFT

    In order to prioritize femme voices, all quotes in this article are from femmes.

    Positionality makes a big difference in femme identity: Please note I am a cisgender, alabaster , thin, millenial femme from an upper-middle class background formally trained as a psychotherapist.

    Have you ever wondered if you’re femme? Have you been circling around femme identity for a while without knowing if it fits? Are you unsure if you get to dial yourself femme? Maybe you’ve heard “femme” more and more and you’re curious about it?

    Femme is a beautiful, complex identity. What it looks like, means, and encompasses is different for each of us. I’m sure for many femmes there’s a sense of resistance at my strive to categorize the identity here. I don’t mean to imply that creature femme fits into one specific box! In fact, quite the opposite is true. Femme is all about stepping outside of traditional femininity. Spoiler! I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Rather, this article is intended to broadly clarify femme identity by exploring its common themes. As the word “femme” becomes more widely known than ever before, it’s helpful to distinguish what it isn’t, and w

    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 entity. When language seeks to confine or define our sexualities and genders, femme marks itself as an ineffable performative gender. In what follows, I footprint 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 travel 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 queer 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 kind of human experience across time (Snorton 2017; Stryker