buffer-overrun

Why the Popular Phrase “Women and Femmes” Makes No Sense. Slate Outward, Kesiena Boom March 16, 201812:34 PM

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/03/women-and-femmes-phrase-in-queer-feminist-activism-makes-no-sense.html

[Note: Kesieng Boom is from the UK, and so this may be simply a case of two countries separated by a common language, but I have also seen this argument put forward by people based in the US.]

I think this critique is based on a basic misunderstanding of what the word “femme” is doing in this context.

The way I understand it is that “femme” here is a self-identification used by AMAB folks who in my cultural context would be trans women, trans-feminine, or femme-of-center NB, but who do not identify with any of those terms. And so in a situation where I might say “cis and trans women survival sex workers are at particularly high risk of sexual violence”, someone who identifies as a femme man might not see that message as including them. It’s an attempt to reflect a group’s self-identification when talking to and about them. And to get away from terms like “men who have sex with men” which is a top-down epidemiology term that has in the past included statistics about trans women (!?!?!?).

Boom pins the history of butch/femme only within the lesbian community but that ignores any history of gender roles in gay men’s history. Boom specifically mentions femme women and femme NB folks and ignores femme men. I do not know all the details of the history of “femme” within gay male communities, but based on The Queen’s Throat (1993) it appears that “no fats, no femmes” was already in wide circulation in the men-seeking-men personals by the early 90s.

There is also a historical association of the term femme with sex work in particular. My first exposure to this was in Stone Butch Blues, which Boom references, but she ignores the sex work part of the 1960s femme identity. A Tumblr comment that has particularly stuck with me is  “i see yr ‘dont use the word femme if you aren’t a lesbian’ and counter to you ‘dont use the word femme if you have never done sex work’” (birlinterrupted 9/14/18 http://birlinterrupted.tumblr.com/post/178081873964/i-see-yr-dont-use-the-word-femme-if-you-arent-a) [See also this article in Feral Feminisms: https://feralfeminisms.com/sex-work-and-allyship/]

Boom’s comparison of “women and femmes” to “men and butches” seems like a straw man. You could sensibly group cis men, trans men, trans masc folks, and masc of center NB folks together in some contexts (e.g. when talking about Grindr users). Butch lesbians would not be included in this, because, as I understand it, women who take on the term “butch lesbian” instead of “masc-of-center NB” are making a specific statement that their gender presentation is defined only in terms of women and is totally separate from (cis or trans) men and masculinity.

In terms of looking at the way misogyny targets femininity (which as Boom points out, excludes all the ways that non-gender conforming women suffer from misogyny), I think the problem is that misogyny includes many different kinds of oppression, and some of those (such as anti-femininity, receptive partner stigma, and sex work stigma) can apply to anyone femme-of-center, including gay men. And these kinds of femme-phobia can happen within the queer and feminist communities. You can argue about whether umbrella terms like misogyny are useful when what you mean is femme-phobia, but there the imprecise word is misogyny not femme.

Ultimately, I don’t actually think that “women and femmes” is a broadly useful construction. If what you mean is “everyone except cis men” you should say that. Another term I’ve heard incorrectly used is “non-male identified folks” used when the person is not intending to specifically exclude trans men. But there are times when “women and femmes” is exactly what the speaker means.

— New York Times, 1858, from Brian Lehrer’s interview of John Strausbaugh on WNYC, April 11, 3012

I was trying to figure out how to use “chip” in a sentence.  It’s one of those words that you run across if you read a lot about drugs, but I think the only person who I ever heard use it was Gabe (who is now a librarian), who asked me if I was a chippie, but he was just sort of testing the word out, and he is incidentally the only person I have ever heard say, “chasing the dragon,” so you know he reads too much.  But I also maybe remember that it was the word that Nicole used when she was so mad about me and Kate getting high at her loft (see this post). I’m terrible at dialog, and it’s not like I was taking notes while Nicole was calling me a hurtful, naive, self-involved junkie.  But it’s a word that Nicole might use – when I went to her baffled by Naked Lunch, she recommended I read Junky and Queer, and even though she’s in graduate school for EE now, she was at one point trying to be a writer, and is very interested in language.

So I was googling around trying to find some examples of chip being used in the wild, and found a drug forum thread about heroin hangovers, which used to happen to me all the time, but which I’ve never heard anyone else talk about.  The morning after I got high, I would get throwing-up-bile sick with a pounding headache and the only thing I could do would be try to get enough fluids into me and sleep it off.  So, apparently, it’s a real thing, and is probably some version of a rebound headache, which is what people who take too much opiate headache medication get.  And it’s a phenomenon peculiar to chippers, because you need to have developed a little bit of tolerance, but not enough to get actual withdrawls.

It’s kind of amazing to me that I managed to do dope for five years without getting strung out.  Which is not to say that I wasn’t psychologically addicted.  I just have to look at the times I quit for months and then started again and how often I thought about it in the interim.  And how much I’ve thought about it since, even as I’ve put myself through the paces of trying to get a real life.