> CIEL Voices & Visions 2003 - Editor's Introduction - Fiction - Non-Fiction - Poetry - Art, Design & Photography
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Femme Identity: Radical Gender from the 1940's In the fall of 2001 I attended a panel discussion on femme identity hosted by the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The audience was full of femmes and butches, trannie boys, queers; a place that - I thought - was home to me. The six-member panel consisted of only one femme, who spent the discussion fielding questions from the audience about what her femme identity meant to her, how she justified it, and why who she was had to be called that. We filed out of the small theatre two and a half hours later, and I wondered how the historical knowledge of femme identity would make the identity of the femme on the panel so much more substantial within her context. I am interested in creating new ways of understanding and interrogating contemporary femme identity. I am interested in a femme identity that is completely historicized and valid by virtue of its history, desire, and lust alone. In the current queer atmosphere of gender fuck and performance, femme is in the process of being resignified, re-understood. As a femme, as a woman who understands her desire in the dynamic between butch and femme, I am invested in these new understandings. . . . |
