While speaking at Hollins University in October of 2017, lauded feminist and scholar bell hooks took a question about an issue much contested in feminism: the value of femininity. It was towards the end of a long and productive conversation about gender and racial justice. The question was a bit convoluted, and no doubt difficult to respond to in the minute or two she had left to speak; but still, the bareness of her response surprised me. She said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that she was not interested in femininity, and that, like toxic masculinity, it should be gotten rid of.

Listen, I’m not trying to take on bell hooks. The terse response she gave that night is likely unrepresentative of everything one of the greatest gender scholars in the world thinks and feels about femininity. But, as a queer woman who *is* femme and *loves* femmes, bell’s dismissal of femininity boiled in my head for days and days. I understood what she likely meant: femininity and womanhood, as constructed by patriarchy, is the subjugated underbelly of masculinity and manhood—the short straw in a shit dichotomy. Still, that’s not how I’ve constructed my femininity. My femininity is integral to my queerness and harmonious with my radical feminist politics. My femininity means leather, body hair, getting and giving what I want in bed, loving other femmes, and working for a sexual assault crisis hotline. In part, my femmeness has nothing to do with patriarchal ideas about womanhood; but, in other ways, I know that the femininity I’ve made for myself exists always in relation to patriarchal expectations. Thinking about the conflict between my queer femmeness and heteropatriarchal femininity invigorated me. I put on my best U-Haul Lesbian get-up and went to work unpacking the contradictions.

In the following months, I thought about my own femmeness and the femmeness of my lovers and friends. I attended a panel on queer femininity at a history conference and attempted to see the ways “femme” has been historically and culturally situated. I read what few writings I could find on femme queer identities (for queer femininity is horribly understudied) and interviewed several femme queer people from inside and outside of my own community. After plenty of daydreaming about fishnets and lipstick, I came to a pretty incomplete conclusion:

Heteropatriarchal femininity is more of a myth than a practice, but it’s a myth that we all contend with and work around when figuring what femininity means to us: as queers, as working class warriors, as people of color, as agents and as pawns in systems of power that are, at once, within us and outside of us. Ultimately, to be “femme” is to forge a self-made femininity that subverts the gender binary and heteropatriarchy by refusing to be defined in opposition to manhood and masculinity. In its autonomy, femmeness does not merely “queer” normative ideas about femininity—it confronts them and challenges them, necessitating a radical reimagining of gender and identity in the process.

The Autonomous Femme

To understand the complexities of queer femme identity, it’s necessary to understand the ways queer femme identity has been misunderstood—both inside and outside of the queer community. In one of the few anthologies dedicated to exploring queer femininity—Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls—editors Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker describe “femme” as a marginalized gender category, maligned historically by lesbians, radical feminists, and society at large. Today, femmes still struggle to be seen as multifaceted, autonomous, and separate from masculinity and misogynistic stereotyping.

Even in queer relationships, femininity is often seen as needing a masculine counterpart. According to Harris and Crocker, queer femmes are most obviously defined “in relation to butch identity.” Without a butch, a femme woman’s queerness is often overlooked. Other queer women may fail to read her as sufficiently queer, and—even worse—straight men may think she’s interested in them. Thus, femmes may feel like they have to continually and aggressively assert their queerness to be acknowledged by other queer people or understood by straights.

Several femme women I interviewed described experiencing erasure first-hand. Hillary, a femme woman from New York, said “I get so exhausted by going to gay bars…and people asking or assuming I'm someone's straight best friend. It's pretty hard to meet people, too, without being overtly sexual or overtly ‘gay.’” Sarah, a femme woman from Maryland, spoke on being femme in straight spaces, where straight men often assume that she is heterosexual, and then, when they find out otherwise, fetishize her. “I’d like for straight men to stop thinking of us as pretty props for their fantasies,” she said.