Anne J.Queer Relations: Theories of Subjectivity and CommunityFinal Paper

A Girl Who Doesn’t Play by the Rules: Complicating Femme Identities

“She told me when we met that she was sick of women assuming she’s a big bad top just because she’s a gentleman. She told me she likes to get fucked…I want to give her what she craves”

-Tristan Taormino, “Stone Femme”

There are at least two joking answers to the question, “what do two femmes do in bed?”

One, according to various internet sites, is some version of “Each other’s makeup,” while the

other, according to one woman interviewed for the essay “Girl Talk: Femmes in Discussion” is

“Not a lot, while they’re waiting for the other to make the first move” (119). While blatantly

stereotypical and reductive, these answers in many ways epitomize the ways femme identities are

constantly flattened and essentialized, even by well meaning queer theorists. Such writers often

seem unable to even go so far as imagining the possibility of two femmes in bed together. At the

heart of this problem is the question, what makes a femme a femme? Is it the way she dresses,

the way she has sex, or who she is attracted to? In the chapter “Trauma and Touch: Butch-

Femme Sexualities,” Ann Cvetkovich argues that “butch untouchability establishes a tension

between private and public, and interiorized and expressed feeling,” implying that this is in

opposition to femmes (73). Such a statement suggests that there is a clear correlation between

femme private and public experiences, leaving untroubled the connection between femme gender

presentation, femme sexual acts, and femme emotional states strategies. Repeatedly, Cvetkovich

figures femmes as emotionally open and sexually receptive, suggesting these characteristics as

defining markers of what it means to be a femme. By suggesting that these spheres are inevitably

linked together in femme identity, Cvetkovich not only plays into the trap of essentializing

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femme-initity, she also more generally shuts off the possibility for the creation of gender and

sexual identities that are not merely a response to traumatic experiences and oppressive forces.

Although Cvetkovich offers many women’s definitions of what it means to be femme,

she tends to collapse them into each other, ultimately essentializing femme identity by assuming

that they all necessitate one another. This is perhaps most evident when she reads femme

narratives, arguing, “making oneself ‘open’ is a physical process of, for example, allowing

oneself to be penetrated, but the ‘inner recesses’ of not just her body but her mind are made

available to her lover. Constructed as ‘openness,’ vulnerability as an emotional state is connected

to the body” (58). Certainly, the coming together of body, emotion, and identity is something

Cvetkovich attempts to interrogate in this work, but her reliance on first person narratives that all

make this link is suspect, in part because there are many other narratives available, and in part

because her readings do not always directly align with the statements she records. She writes that

“Amber Hollibaugh describes the femme’s self-definition in terms of her ability to name and

take her pleasure,” associating the femme with an active position, then generalizes from a variety

of femme narratives to state, “for all these women, femme sexuality is about voracious desire for

which no apologies are necessary because it can be accepted and fulfilled by another’s

attentions” (57). In the first instance, femme identity seems to be about setting the terms of one’s

pleasure. But Hollibaugh’s actual words are, “I am real defined by how I want to be fucked”

(57). In Cvetkovich’s reading, it is taken for granted that femme pleasure will involve “being

fucked,” and femme identity carries the built in assumption of being the “object” of attention, the

one who desires pleasure and has it given to her.

At first glance, writer and self-identified “feminist pornographer” Tristan Taormino’s

narrative of sexual pleasure would seem to fit Cvetkovich’s pattern. Consider this slightly altered

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sentence from the final chapter of Taormino’s book true lust, “She sucks my fingers into her

cunt, eager, open. I love femmes who take my hand so willingly and without apology” (246).

The only difference in the book version is that instead of “femmes,” Taormino, a self-identified

femme dyke, writes “butches.” Taormino here offers a portrait almost exactly in line with

Cvetkovich’s expectations, one where the receptive partner plays an active role and has their

desires fulfilled, but here the femme penetrates the butch. Such a scenario is invisible when all

discussion of femmes centers around “femme accounts of receptivity” (63). Although somewhat

limiting itself, the basic problem with Cvetkovich’s lack of diversity in examining femme

narratives is summed up by Jewelle Gomez, who identifies a stereotype where “Femmes are

always bottoms and want to be fucked” and responds, “If we believed things are always this

simple, we could have stayed heterosexual” (107).

Cvetkovich discusses inherent contradictions in the butch-femme model, but she

ultimately places all of them on the butch. She notes that there is “an apparent paradox of butch

sexuality” where the attentive butch “could, in her eagerness to tend to another’s desires, as

easily be considered feminine as masculine” (68). Yet while butch identity is shown to contain a

paradox, prompting Cvetkovich to state that “the links between gender and untouchability are not

necessarily predictable” (68), femme identity as a category is never subjected to the same

questioning, instead, aspects of femme identity are shown to be equally “active” and “difficult,”

but are never shown to potentially be unpredictable or somehow divergent from what’s expected.

Despite Cvetkovich’s efforts to mark the femme as active here, she ends up making her a kind of

given, on which the complications of butch identity are played out. Lynda Hart notes that such a

method is inherited from traditional treatment of the figure of “woman,” writing, “she is the

marker, the placeholder, of this necessary lack that constitutes desire…The femme operates, like

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the woman, as an incitement to non-being, which ironically gives shape, substance, and

coherence to the butch” (219). Here, though, it is precisely the femme’s pre-definition, instead of

her lack of one, that allows her to be ignored in favor of mapping the ways that butch identities

are resistant to simple categorization.

For example, instead of pointing to femme “voracious desire” as potentially shaking up

any naturalized linkage between presumed gender affiliation and sexual practice, Cvetkovich

shows how the presumed quality of femme receptivity is actually “labor” (58). This may lead to

a “redefinition of femme power,” but it does not challenge the basic assumptions that a “femme”

identity dictates what one does in bed, or that being open sexually equals an open emotional

state. It’s not that the cracks in a overarching femme identity don’t show in Cvetkovich’s essay,

they do, but for all her attention to redefinition and contradiction, she glosses over them. Two

pages after mentioning that femmes have “voracious desire,” this aspect of femme sexuality

disappears in her reading that “the femme emphasizes the way in which her pleasure emerges in

response to her partner’s desire” (59). If femmes can both experience desire and be the object of

it, if their desire can bring out pleasure in another and their pleasure can come from another’s

desire, it seems highly possible that other facets of femme sexuality might be fluid, unstable –

but in the essay the femme is a stagnant figure, unchanging from individual to individual, almost

interchangeable. Hart argues that while there is a linguistic utterance, albeit a shaming one, for

butches whose sexual acts do not match the presumptions brought on by their gender

presentation: “butch in the streets, femme in the sheets,” there is no femme compliment to the

phrase (222). This leads to a problem, she worries, whereby “while there is much talk of

butch/femme couplings as an erotics of ambiguity, there remains…the problem of the ‘femme’

occupying the position that clarifies the ambiguity” (222). Despite the very powerful ways in

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which Cvetkovich’s article attempts to challenge the potential meanings of sexual practices such

as penetration, then, the femme still comes to hold an essential and stable identity.

Cvetkovich can go to great lengths to describe “the butch as womanly because they do

not demand a rejection of female vulnerability” (72), but the femme remains stable in her

articulation as a woman, who looks and acts “feminine” and embraces vulnerability. She writes

that such vulnerability can be an “often difficult achievement” (58), but this argument does not

have the correlating power of suggesting that femmes could have desirable elements of

masculinity within them. Taormino sarcastically represents the position Cvetkovich comes to

embody as a plainly false simplification, “Femmes wear skirts because they want to get fucked”

(247). When articulated thus, the ridiculousness of the claim comes to light, as do its associations

with the sexist claim that women who dress in certain ways are asking to be assaulted. Yet by

making femme always equal the one who “both gives and takes in the process of being

penetrated” (64), Cvetkovich may complicate the meanings of penetration, but she essentializes

femme identity as much as Taormino’s mocking generalization does. Similarly, in Judith Roof’s

article on butch-femme identities in the 90s, only butch identity is marked as being “monstrous”

“anti-assimilationist,” and “intrinsically campily ironic” (34-35), while femme identities become

invisible except as the corollary to the “threatening” butch. Cvetkovich thus fits a common

pattern of making butch identity the marker of queer difference. Hart notes that this is a problem

in much theoretical discussion on butch-femme identities, writing, “it is often assumed that the

femme is ‘invisible’ without the presence of the butch. It is, in other words, the butch’s visibility

that brings the femme into focus as a femme, otherwise she simply disappears into the optical

field occupied by the heterosexual woman” (218). Here, femme becomes defined by butch, and

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the whole question of two femmes in bed together drop out of the picture entirely, making

femme identity nothing more than a corollary of butchness.

By holding to this pattern, Cvetkovich replicates a mistake made by a strand of lesbian

feminism that labeled butch-femme cultures patriarchal and homophobic. Judith Roof contends

that such an assertion was made possible only by the assumption that genders were “emanating

naturally from biological sex” (33). With Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work, however, she

explains that this position becomes much less tenable (33). Masculinity and femininity become

available grounds for queer identities again, because they are not identical to male and female

identities, which would, in certain readings, cause a replication of heterosexual relationships and

propagation of patriarchal norms. By ultimately making both butch and femme genders about

being a “woman,” which seems to translate into having emotions that make you vulnerable at

some level, Cvetkovich collapses gender and sex. Ironically, this ends up putting butch and

femme identities in the same position as lesbian feminism, in which, according to Roof “gender

differences among women were still not comprehended,” (33), only now it is gender differences

among femmes that become invisible.

For Cvetkovich, the trauma of penetration enables a self-shattering that allows femmes to

work through traumatic experiences in a homophobic society. She explains that femmes

“negotiate the trauma of the social world within sexual relations…Sexual practice serves as a

vehicle through which trauma can be articulated and reworked” (66). Here, femmes themselves

must be opened up to reach the inner self which has withdrawn due to trauma, but an alternative

possibility exists for femmes in opening up the societal norms that cause trauma in the first

place. Butch-femme identities would act in this model as pro-active offenses against a

homophobic and patriarchal system, instead of developing as healing mechanisms. Roof suggests

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that in the 1990s, the re-emergence of butch-femme identities is part of a larger turn towards

recognizing the distinction between sex and gender, and that “a new and different model of queer

politics” emerges, “whose object is no longer so much the correction of gender oppression, as the

enlargement of political freedoms in relation to personal choices” (35). She goes on to argue that

“This opens gender up to a more multiple reading” (35). Here, butch-femme identities are

created as part of increased possibilities and multiple sites of identification. Although they draw

on older models, these forms are enacted in the context of creation, and are free to move beyond

the confinement of merely reacting to oppressive forms.

When sexual, emotional, and appearance based definitions of femme identities come

apart, the only way to know what “femme” means is by looking to self-definition, a mode of

knowing that will inherently incite a multiplicitly of ways to identify as femme. This practice can

accomplish the task of expanding ways to “articulate experiences of feeling in terms other than

stigmatized notions of vulnerability” (Cvetkovich, 72) by refusing to let any experience of

feeling necessarily fit with any given identity. One interviewee in the essay “Girl Talk” claims

that for her and her partner, “We have to define what’s butch and what’s femme…between us”

(119, writer’s italics). This argument does not do away with the concept of butch and femme

identities, but returns the power of definition to those being defined, and also makes it a

relational process of partnership, very different from the definitions imposed by some abstract

theory. Roof argues that this notion of power is actually not only more compatible with, but

necessary for, the reemergence of butch-femme identities as political possibilities, writing,

If dominant culture is perceived as having all the power to define and oppress, then the purity of category as in lesbian feminism makes sense. But if power is perceived as a more dispersed and varied formation linked to disseminations of knowledge and technologies of control in a more Foucauldian analysis, then there is no central assailable locus of power located primarily in dominant culture, and

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categorical purity becomes less a political necessity and more an exercise of oppressive power itself (34).

Lesbian feminism, Roof suggests, arises out of concern that in order to oppose the powerful, in

their view the heterosexual, one needed to eliminate any trace of similarity with them, and thus

could easily distinguish what was “resistant” and what was “oppressive” by cutting out any

acknowledgement of difference within sexual categories. An interpretation of power that figures

all parties as implicated, however, cannot allow sexual identities to arise out of a simply resistant

or oppositional model, which leads to many more possibilities to choose from. Cvetkovich

describes Cherrie Moraga’s “understanding of butch sexuality as a response to colonialism’s

structures of feeling” (72), but in debunking presumptions about what makes a butch and what

makes a femme, these identities are no longer at the mercy of oppressive systems, though they

are negotiating with them.

In this light, Moraga’s “image that represents the expression of feeling as a physical

movement from internal to external,” which Cvetkovich reads as “an inversion of penetration”

and thus a defining butch quality (72), could just as easily be seen as an expression of a femme

practice of making feeling visible. Taormino, for example, describes her appearance as the

externalization of her self-defined identity: “My gender presentation was unmistakable – blatant

female sexuality. I was a proud, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, uppity, don’t-assume-I’m-

straight-because-I-wear-lipstick-and-dresses femme dyke…Even though I was sure I’d be

mistaken for straight, the boys took one look at me and steered clear” (244). While she claims

the presentation was “unmistakable” as “female sexuality,” she doesn’t define what that is – to

her, it seems, it could be part of this very presentation itself, not necessarily correlating with a

sexual position or act. This narrative depicts a femme story of externalizing the internal, offering

an alternative reading of the Moraga image that is based not in sexual acts but in gender

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presentation. Obviously, this would not be the only reading, or a necessarily desirable one. But

by refusing to presume an association between emotions, sexual acts, and appearance, both butch

and femme identities, but especially the too often essentialized femme, can be sites of

proliferating possibility, instead of emanating solely from oppressive discourses.

Despite the refusal of femme identities as predetermined and obviously knowable, this

essay does not intend to undermine many of Cvetkovich’s central arguments. In fact, the coming

apart of compulsory relations between emotion, sexual behavior, and appearance allows for a

symbolic “breach or penetration” of borders (49), a “trauma” to identity categories themselves.

Cvetkovich argues that “touch can be so affecting as to be traumatic” (49), and if histories can

touch one another, certainly traditional visions of identity categories can, as well. This model

perhaps achieves Cvetkovich’s objective without sacrificing femme complexity and difference.

Ultimately, these rigid categorizations themselves (not butch-femme identities, but the

presumption of the links between different parts of identity and behavior) are traumatic

experiences for many. Hart writes, “One of the ways butch/femme ‘works,’ both erotically and

socially, is as a disciplinary mechanism. It keeps us in ‘our places,’ ostensibly. Yet of course it

does not always, or maybe not even often, accomplish its goal. It may, in fact, be a barrier to

either a butch’s or a femme’s ability to recognize her own desires” (222). This act of keeping one

in place against their desires can be read as “equivalent to invasive physical contact” (50),

pressing against wants and impulses.

By theoretically moving between these disciplined arenas, one penetrates these

categorical bodies and works through the trauma experienced through their enforcement. This

barrier, as Hart, Taormino, and others demonstrate, is often breached for pleasure and desire.

Such a model may not be as sexy as Cvetkovich’s, but it removes the compulsion to match one’s

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bodily appearance to one’s sexual practice to one’s emotional availability. Of course, many

people will still embrace a femme identity that encapsulates the assumptions of Cvetkovich’s

depiction, but this will be one form of the identity, not the definition of it. Certainly, as

Cvetkovich suggests, pleasure for many people comes in the form of breaking through barriers,

although this can also mean going beyond what has been preconceived. As Tristan Taormino

realizes of herself, “being a dyke is not just about who I fuck and love, it’s about being a girl

who doesn’t play by the rules” (245). Maybe, then, the true answer to the question “what do two

femmes do in bed?” is something along the lines of, “whatever they damn well please.”

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Bibliography

Carolin, Louise, with Catherine Bewley. “Girl Talk: Femmes in Discussion.” Butch/Femme:

Inside Lesbian Gender. Ed. Sally R. Munt. London: Cassell, 1998.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities.” An Archive of Feelings:

Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Gomez, Jewelle L. “Femme Erotic Independence.” Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender. Ed.

Sally R. Munt. London: Cassell, 1998.

Hart, Lynda. “Living Under the Sign of the Cross: Some Speculations on Femme Femininity.”

Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender. Ed. Sally R. Munt. London: Cassell, 1998.

Roof, Judith. “1970s Lesbian Feminism Meets 1990s Butch-Femme.” Butch/Femme: Inside

Lesbian Gender. Ed. Sally R. Munt. London: Cassell, 1998.

Taormino, Tristan. True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn, and Perversion. San Francisco: Cleis

Press, 2002.

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