Dirt Roads and Bucket Baths: Practicalities of portable femme identity.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I am on my knees in the dirt, my worn jeans already covered with mud and bike grease as I engage in the now weekly ritual of cleaning over 100 kilometers worth of dirt road out off my Peace Corps issued Trek Navigator 100. I run my hand through my short hair, push my glasses back up my nose and try to get a decent tire pressure out of a pump that would be far more useful for road-side emergencies than it is for routine maintenance. Absentmindly I pick dirt out of my perfectly manicured fingernails painted MAC vintage vamp.
Much like the devil, femininity is often in the details. I have identified as a femme since renouncing the prescribed jeans, tshirts and sneakers lesbian uniform in college and have struggled with the practicality of that identity for about as long.
When I picture femme I see old school 50’s femmes with perfectly painted red lips and smart black pumps. I see perfume and pink lace too. But when I look deeper I see strength and sometimes contradiction. I see buzzcuts with little black dresses, and hippie mamas in Doc Martine’s. And though I idealize Bettie Page, I believe that femme is too nuanced an identity to be encompassed in a single image.
Femme is not practical. It isn’t meant to be, and the outrageous flamboyancy of it is half the fun. However, I would argue that femme as a queer identity describes not just a look, but an attitude. This is not your mother’s femininity. Femme can certainly be pretty, dainty, and sweet, but it can also corner your mother’s femininity at the playground steal its lunch money and graphiti its desk with lipstick.
I said earlier that I struggle with the practicality of being a femme. I travel. A lot. Somewhere in a box in America there are at least 7 pairs of black heels (including one pair of Pleasures six-inch stilettos,) and at least three pairs of red strappy saddles. And while my favorite shoes while away their time in a box in America I am living in rural Thailand where as I learned three months ago, heels die fast. There is a backpacker joke that says you can always spot the backpackers in a club because they are still wearing their hiking boots – it’s true, and my hiking boots happen to be a pair of red patent leather Doc Martians.
I pride myself on being able to travel light. Having made a habit of spending weekends in New York in the pursuit of hopeless love affairs without much more than could fit in my purse, and summers working and traveling abroad I have developed a low maintenance femme identity if there ever was one. One of the things that occurs while traveling is that you become stripped down to basics. This affects more than just image; for example, as I write this essay I am wishing I had my extensive collection of reference materials at hand. However, what I have found is that even stripped of all the typical trappings of femme identity I am still unquestionably femme.
What exactly that means, however, can be somewhat hard to describe. Having to continuously adjust my behavior and presentation to the needs of my environment makes me acutely aware of the separation between identity, orientation, and practice. Does that make me sounds like a closet case? Probably, but it needn’t.
Honesty and openness are extremely important to me. I feel that being out is not only vital to my emotional well being, but also a responsibility I have to the queer community which nurtured and empowered me. I strive to be flexible, and to borrow a Peace Corps term, culturally appropriate. However, I draw the line at denying who and what I am. Of course, this means not only maintaining a queer identity in an often conservative straight world, but also defining myself in the queer world independently of our community’s expectations and mores.
Femme has a rich history in the queer world, but only recently has it come to stand alone rather than as a part of the butch/femme paradigm. As queer community evolved and our understanding of identity becomes more sophisticated we are able to better define ourselves and the world around us. As everyday survival becomes less of a struggle we are left with more time and energy to examine the multi-dimensional canvas of our identity.
My understanding of femme and femininity is shaped by a multitude of factors – queer history, third wave feminism, the riot grrl movement and my mother to name a few. I find it interesting and at times terrifying that the queer community has been so puritanical in defining gender and sexual expression. Femme is a compliment to butch. Femmes will wear makeup and dresses; they will not build things or wear ties. The femme is the passive partner, the butch is the aggressor, or top if you will. At times it seems as if the queer community does a far more thorough job of policing and defining its members than the conservative right wing can ever hope to do.
Of course these are only surface stereotypes, but the very fact that we have a language of transgression (butch in the streets, femme in the sheets for example) suggests that these stereotypes are somehow woven into the fabric of our subcultural identity.
I strongly suspect, though I can’t prove it at the moment that femme identity was never quite as easy to describe as a snapshot of 1940s and 50s high femme might suggest. After all, my femme foremothers lived through the early days of the queer liberation movement, WWII, and a level of institutionalized sexism that I can not begin to imagine. These women were not weak.
That said, it is out of these overarching cultural stereotypes that I began to form my femme identity. This is hard. It is hard to write and infinitely harder to do. After coming out as queer, and embracing lesbian identity only to later realize that it does not fit. After going back through the proverbial meat-grinder, and with much fanfare and fear of becoming a tool of the patriarchy (yes, sadly, even in this day and age) exchanging bagy jeans for miniskirts. After defending those miniskirts to over-zealous women’s studies majors, and then defending my queer identity to an overly optimistic Jewish grandmother. I thought I had finally settled into my newfound queer identity only to then realize that the terms of that identity as they had been laid out did not fit any better than the original lesbian uniform I had been handed. So I defined my own terms. I defined a femininity that is as bold as it is pretty.
I shaved my head and wore short skirts with combat boots. I did my nails and got my hands dirty. I took up belly-dancing and got my motorcycle license. And for a long time I set identity politics on the back burner on the presumption that you can argue your right to do something or you can just bloody well do it.
But now I’ve put all my pretty shoes in a box and moved to Thailand. It is funny how you can almost forget about identity until it’s threatened. In America I read about identity politics and argued for the inclusion of authors such as Gayle Rubin and Carol Queen in women’s studies classes, but I never seriously confronted the contradictions in my own identity. Surrounded by a liberal queer community and wonderful radical femme role-models I took these contradictions as well as my femininity for granted. It becomes very hard to take femme identity for granted, however, when your makeup melts before you finish applying it, and your one attempt at shaving your legs in a bucket bath ends I blood and tears.
So I am redefining femme identity yet again, this time not only as a controversial image but as an attitude and orientation. This is the pivot point where I try to drag my own insecure self, and you: my now confused reader, past the point where other people have a say in who we are. Because after all the work that we put into presenting femininity, after the manicures, the uncomfortable heels, the plucking, waxing, shaving (yes, even in the absents of running water), and hundreds of hard earned dollar spent on make-up femme identity still can’t be bought. Femme identity is an intrinsic part of me that is perhaps more evident in the fact that I would attempt to shave my legs in a poorly lit outhouse with no running water than in the smooth silky legs I hoped to achieve.
About two months ago I was living with a Thai family while most of my belongings were in storage. When I was given a rare opportunity to remove some necessary items from storage I eagerly rushed over to the storage room, climbed over 54 other people’s suitcases and dug through my own hastily packed bright pink Swiss Army travel pack to find a lip-liner, nail polish, and my Lonely Planet guide to Thailand. Those were the items I missed most during my first three months in rural Thailand, and I must admit that is a pretty good snapshot of who I am.