Tag: femme

You Know When Working Class Performances Of Femininity

Are denigrated as looking like “a drag queen” (which they often are) or as “hard” or other ways of saying “unfeminine” it’s essentially about delegitimizing working class women’s status as women and thus invalidating their feminine performance.  To perform working class femininity is weird and paradoxical because it’s opposed to the construction of “true femininity” (soft, delicate, passive, subtle bourgeois femininity).  Like true femininity as it is constructed is distinctly opposed to looking like a barbie doll, bourgeois femininity is considered natural and real, whereas working class women are considered to be only masquerading as feminine, and they are seen either as mindless objects, “only an appearance” without any true femininity (or anything else) behind it, or as pretenders to femininity, non-women to whom it does not naturally come.

The hyperfeminine appearing hypersexual “uncultured” non-woman is often contrasted with the refined, virtuous, pure “true woman”.  Bourgeois men are culturally chastised for marrying the “bit o’ fluff bimbo” but the same stereotype is used as a boogey man to keep bourgeois women invested in pleasing their men

Working Class Women

Don’t have access to the hyper feminine hyper sexual post feminist masquerade, but also don’t have access to the anti-feminine anti-sexual second wave position, because on a working class body both reflect stigmatized “deviant” femininities, the first being the slut, the second the slob.

A Call For Submissions: Lipstick Red: A Zine About Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist and Proletarian Femininities.

So I’m doing it, I’m doing a zine about leftist femininity and proletarian femininity, please submit articles, artwork and so on to yourprincessmadeira@gmail.com.

Stories about the experience of being a feminine working class person, about style as resistance, about wearing your class pride on your sleeve, about experiencing sneers from bourgeois intellectuals for being “trashy” or whatever very welcome.

The Cuteness Matrix // Jealousy, Polyamory, Femininity

Not being into masc folks has made it a lot easier for me to love other fem people, because I only love other fem people.  Honestly, I’m not even poly but excluding masc people from my love life has been awesome. 

Even so, I’ve had fem partners be pissed that I was getting more masc attention even though neither of us was into masc people

The Cuteness Matrix // Jealousy, Polyamory, Femininity

thepeacockangel:

leighalanna:

thepeacockangel:

throughmotion:

pixiewithapurpose:

Girls who “reclaim their femininity” are just… so mysterious to me. Who exactly tried to take it from you? Who told you that being feminine wasn’t a-okay? idk I’ve never heard any social message that wasn’t urging me to wear makeup and tight clothes, to shave and to be girly. Sounds more like you internalized the message that you shouldn’t be like those “ugly, hairy, unladylike women” to the point where you’d do anything to distance yourselves from them. Including spewing the lie that they’re somehow more accepted than you are.

the answer is men. who has tried to take my femininity, my sexuality, my very personhood? men. I don’t know about straight women, but when femmes talk about reclaiming femininity, we’re talking about taking it back from men & their gaze—defiantly asserting that our femininity & our sexuality does not exist for their benefit or in relation to them at all. I am not distancing myself from butch women by naming myself femme.

Actually, I grew up in an enviornment where girly clothes, makeup and all the rest was for “stupid girls” and I recognize that this is not common, but I grew up in an area where the proliferation of second wave was very thorough.

My mother would never let me wear what I liked it was always “too frou frou”, makeup was for girls who didn’t think or care about the enviornment or whatever stupid bullshit, and basically the only acceptable thing was to be an utterly self sacrificing earth mother who spent all her time barefoot and making organic vegan food so the men could talk about how ethical and progressive they were.  It wasn’t about being butch, it was about not taking time for yourself.  The acceptable woman isn’t selfish, doesn’t deck herself in shiny things or spend hours painting her face because that is unacceptable vanity and immodesty (at least where I’m from) and the criticism of “vanity and immodesty” got turned into something “radical” by hippie dudes who just want you barefoot in the kitchen and not messing with your hair because it interferes with your schedule of serving their domestic needs.

Like butchness and femmeness are both unacceptable to men, butchness because it refuses to be sweetly feminine, and femmeness because it’s self focused and not focused on caring for the needs of men.

And let’s not lose sight of the fact that just because femininity is forced on and expected of women does not mean that it isn’t constantly denigrated and reviled. Like, far be it from me to come out in favor of weaponized femininity, but the idea that women have unchallenged ownership of their relationship to beauty is childish bollocks.
And this is in no way antithetical to the relationship of butch or masculine presenting women to *their* beauty.

Or general worth and goodness because beauty is a bollox word in my opinion.  Butch and femme both challenge the idea that femininity is performed as a service for men (and the societal idea that femininity is only acceptable to the degree that a man wants and accepts it, no more, no less)

Also it’s probably important to bring up the erasure and denigration of black women’s femininity, it’s not my place but I’m pretty sure that the cultural tendency to strip black women of their femininity is fucking problematic

http://www.academia.edu/6048649/Theorizing_Black_Femininity

http://www.forharriet.com/2014/11/aint-i-woman-aint-i-woman-erasure-of.html#axzz3UfXeJ7BK

http://www.adiosbarbie.com/2014/03/lupita-nyongo-and-the-evolving-paradox-of-black-femininity/

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/black-femininity